This weekend the baseball team will play in its seventh consecutive Ivy League championship. Yet the team’s longstanding success has hardly captured the same attention as, say, the football team’s third-place finish this past fall. That’s rather jarring, considering how deeply baseball is ingrained in American sports culture, snd shows the large gap in popularity between professional and collegiate baseball.
Football and basketball have wider public followings than do other collegiate sports — games are nationally televised, experts break down the games and the players and postseason play always rises to the top of the sports world’s focus.
Why, then, has baseball failed to achieve the same stature? The simple answer may be that, for basketball and football, the collegiate level is the avenue that superstars must take en route to the professional league. This inevitably means that the nation’s most talented players are broadcast to a national audience. In baseball, often the exceptional players get drafted and directly enter the minor league, bypassing college ball altogether.
Baseball has such allure, regardless of the skill level of those on the diamond, and that’s what makes it particularly striking that baseball doesn’t receive anywhere near the same attention at the college level.
First, fans’ experience at the ballgame is unlike that of any other sporting venue. It is about so much more than just the game itself. In this sense, attending games has become a sort of ritual, not just a display of great athleticism. In my trips to almost half of the MLB ballparks, I’ve seen the unique features that each tries to provide for its visitors. Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are known as the three “cathedrals,” with their sacred history and loyal fan bases. The building of Camden Yards in 1992 ushered in a revolution in baseball stadiums, placing an emphasis on aesthetics (the warehouse in right field), signature food (Boog Powell’s barbecue) and shopping (the shops on Eutaw Street in right field). Many stadiums built since have emulated Camden.
Yet we hardly differentiate among football stadiums or basketball arenas; at most, we’ll talk about which ones are rowdiest, or which fans are hardest to control. There is little about those venues that would render them an American cultural icon.
An outing to the ballpark, in fact, is often many young people’s first encounter with sports, and it continues to be the most family-friendly sporting event to attend, which you can’t say about football.
Second, little league baseball is many athletes’ first experience playing sports. It can start at age 5 and is highly inclusive, giving everyone the chance to get playing time. As we grow up, becoming an avid fan is a way to stay connected to the sport we first played.
Third, there’s much more focus on history in baseball than in any other sport. The World Series, at over 100 years old, is one of the longest-running championships. Fans are generally knowledgeable about the best players of a bygone era — think Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams and Willie Mays. Fans nationwide have a relatively good collective memory of the highlights, traditions and myths of the past — just consider how, until 2004, baseball observers inevitably linked the Red Sox’s woes to the Curse of the Bambino. In football and basketball, however, we don’t hear nearly the same extent of historical references.
All of this should leave us thinking: why not channel our nation’s love affair with baseball at the college level? Doing so would give baseball student-athletes the appreciation they deserve and would show us that the revenue-producing sports aren’t the only ones worthy of our support.
