Tomorrow is Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. Southern outrage over shifting the game out of Atlanta has died down, and most people–including diehard baseball fans–yawn at the misnamed Midsummer Classic. All-star games of all sports are passé, but baseball’s is particularly meaningless.
Baseball players used to go all out because they were heroic to millions of Americans. Gone are the days in which Pete Rose barreled over the catcher to score the winning run, Stan Musial homered in the 12th to give the NL a victory, and Ted Williams did the same for the AL. Gone also is what was a good idea: the champion of the league that won the All-Star Game got home field advantage if the World Series went seven games.
The game is now of such low importance that some selected All Stars feign injuries or “family emergencies” to get out of it. After all, the biggest reason to be named an All Star is that it activates escalator clauses in player contracts. A few innings of the game gets an average payout of $18,500, but be called an All Star activates contract bonus clauses of $100,000 or more. Why not just cash the big check and stay home? That’s what Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, and three other Astros plan to do. (Leave to the Astros to bring the game down another notch.)
So, let’s forget the game and talk about nostalgia differently. At my last visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum, I ducked down to the basement to see some of Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. Few Americans were as good at nostalgia as Rockwell and it’s hardly surprising that he often used baseball as a metaphor for values and activities that helped define a distinctly American character.
Rockwell (1894-1978) grew up in a devout Christian home. His father managed a Philadelphia textile firm, though young Norman spent summers on New England farms. When he was eight, the family moved to New York City and Norman’s schools stressed physical education and team sports. He wasn’t very good at them and was destined to make his mark in art, but Rockwell’s boyhood was one in which Victorianism was giving way to a movement known as muscular Christianity, as exemplified by the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, outdoor life, and the national pastime of baseball.
Rockwell grew to be a skinny beanpole (6’ 140 pounds) but he also became suspicious of dandies. Some worried that Americans were becoming soft and effete. A 1916 Saturday Evening Post cover captures it. The upper-class toff pushing the baby carriage is dressed as a miniature adult: suit, leather gloves, derby hat, and carnation in his lapel buttonhole. We can easily imagine ta banker father. Two scruffier and happier boys are having a laugh at his expense. Of course, they are decked out in their baseball uniforms. Rockwell suggests that baseball is a class leveler.
Six years later, a cover of a gangly, nerdy boy could very well be Rockwell himself. Everything about the boy is amusingly ironic: a shirt that says “Champ,” arms only slightly thicker than his glasses, and feet way too big to balance his frame. Somehow, we don’t think the small barbells he grips will transform him into the poster image at which he stares.
Some of Rockwell’s best covers, though, refracted baseball through lenses of whimsy and nostalgia. Here are two personal favorites. Rockwell’s 1939 cover for baseball’s 100th anniversary–if you believe the hoary Abner Doubleday myth–is pure nostalgia. It appears to be a game from either from the late 19th or early 20th century. Note the hurler’s uniform and mustache, and the fact that the formally attired umpire is crouching behind the pitcher rather than the catcher. How different the pitcher looks from mound heroes of 1935 such as Dizzy Dean, Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell, or Red Ruffing.
A 1949 illustration often titled “Rained Out” is just great fun. Gaze upon the umpires’ gurning faces and notice that they now wear uniforms. The rain bounces and puddles in the Homeplate ump’s hand. Behind two managers are having a funny conversation. Rockwell took some liberties, but this is Ebbetts Field, which we know because Brooklyn is the home team on the scoreboard. The sourpuss manager certainly isn’t Dodgers skipper Burt Shotton. We might be looking at a caricature of Pirates manager Billy Meyer, who had a bulbous nose. The scoreboard tells us that Pittsburgh is the visiting team.
Norman Rockwell captured things in baseball now sorely lacking: the joy of the game, ways it evoked the American spirit, and imagining simpler times. The 2021 All-Star Game evinces a different America. Escalator clauses for millionaires are not nostalgic or pure. Alas, they are too much like an America dominated by materialism, cutthroat business, and narcissism.
Rob Weir
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