Mythologizing Baseball in Print and Film
America's National Pastime is the once deeply pure and widely beloved, and now often cynically regarded and business oriented business of baseball. Once a sport and a game, it is now very clearly dominated by a corporate identity, with enormous wage figures and heavy advertising stakes rendering baseball a crass shadow of its former self. Indeed, with the revelations of major steroid abuse in the sport across the last decade and a half, it is challenging to look on the sport as though its reputation has not been drastically tarnished. Indeed, it has been, with the disillusioning impact of this realization that many of our most cherished heroes have for all intents and purposes cheated their collective way to the top of the record books, quite impossible to return to the pristine impressions of the ballgame that tie it into the trappings of classic America. In two works on the subject of America's deep and sentimental relationship with baseball, we are presented with the mythology of the National Pastime as it is perpetuated from generation to generation. In literary examples alone, the legacy of baseball as a forum for fathers and sons to relate, old friends to come together, families to take an occasion together and for the
construction of American iconography to be posited, still survives. Given the focus of the media on baseball's scandalous recent history rather than its storied past, the images elevated by the two works in question are difficult to appreciate today. This of course, leaves us ultimately to ponder the realism of holding baseball, still, in this regard. There permeates the film a sensation of longing for a time in which the stage was smaller, the players more dedicated and the intent more singular. A story which becomes deeply entwined also in the reference of baseball iconography by focusing a subplot on the retrieval of an autographed Babe Ruth baseball from a vicious neighboring dog, The Sandlot returns baseball to the time of its youth. More than this dynamic, which centers heroism on baseball aptitude, there is a warm and reminiscent feel to The Sandlot that, in addition to explicitly casting the movie in the 1960s, also casts it into a historical context. However, there is a clear sense that they are drawn together both by their affection for the game and their collective respect for Benny, whose skill makes him the assumptive leader of the group. The preservation of baseball in this contexts suggests a widespread literary desire to actually see baseball returned to this place of lost innocence. That is to say that there is an opportunity both in the unscripted play on the field and the in the aesthetic approach taken by those who have tended to lionize it in art, for baseball to reflect a melodrama that is by the nature of its origin and the scale of its cultural importance, somehow symptomatic of an American melodrama. Namely, competitiveness is actually buffeted by a primary interest in fun. The isolation which characterizes the experience of his pitching a perfect game is of direct importance in understanding this disposition. The sheer skill and personal virtue of Benny Rodriguez is compelling in The Sandlot, rendering a situation in which his heroism was nothing short of infectious. " (Shaara, 26) Shaara's writing smacks of a sentiment that is hard to hold as realistic in this day and age, but which, almost to that purpose, defiantly holds on to baseball as a context in which this sort of dreamy sentiment is almost acceptable. In one strikingly corny exchange, one character remarks to Chapel, "so you are the best.
Common topics in this essay:
Benny Rodriguez,
National Pastime,
Billy Chapel,
David Evans,
Love Game,
Babe Ruth,
Williams DiMaggio,
Rodriguez Sandlot,
Barry Bonds,
Hank Aaron's,
business baseball,
benny rodriguez,
love game,
context business,
billy chapel,
national pastime,
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Acceptance Essays
