Comparing Basketball, Baseball, and the Civil War

Baseball and basketball's differences reveal a lot about American culture. Plus, they're kind of funny.

                   BASEBALL vs. BASKETBALL

The baseball uniform looks like a formal outfit, something you wear to church. 

The basketball uniform looks like a bathing suit, something you wear to the pool.

Baseball looks like a battlefield, with a few soldiers trying to pass through enemy territory. 

Basketball looks like a dance floor, with couples trying to decide who they should dance with next.

Baseball is played outdoors, on green grass.

Basketball is played indoors, on a beige floor.

What lies beneath these differences? Baseball comes out of 19th-century agricultural America. Basketball comes out of 20th- and 21st-century office culture: fast-paced, lots of teamwork and immediate, visible rewards, all played out in clean indoor spaces with florescent lights. Baseball is slow and formal. Basketball is fast and informal, like the times when they rose to popularity.

Both baseball and basketball entertain millions of people, so there's no use asking that impossibly subjective question, "Which is better?" I just want to suggest that the entertainment in each case draws on resonances with larger economic and cultural trends, at least for some people in messy, semi-conscious, and individual ways. Obviously there's no such thing as a single "America," and probably few people look at basketball uniforms and think "That's a bathing suit." This baseball-basketball comparison is partly a joke, but not completely. I hope it encourages thinking about the resonances between sports and larger cultural forces. (Sorry, I can't think of a funnier way to say that.)

 

Wait, Baseball Is Connected to War:
I'm obviously paying tribute here to comedian George Carlin's famous riff on the difference between baseball and football. But while I love Carlin's comparative method and most of his insights, I can't agree with his depiction of baseball as gentle and peaceful. Baseball is actually like a battlefield, as I just suggested. It's as much rooted in warfare as football—just a different kind of warfare.

Baseball's underlying combat structure is not World War II's "long bombs" and "aerial assaults," which Carlin rightly connected with football. Instead, baseball resembles and re-enacts the basic combat structure of the American Civil War: line infantry, i.e., standing out in the open while the enemy fires at you, and you try to return fire and get closer to them. The central challenge for many soldiers in the Civil War was to have the courage to stand on the field while someone shot at them from close range, and that's the same challenge faced today by a batter who has to stand in place while a pitcher throws a hard, fast projectile at them.

Civil War Reenactment

And baseball still revolves around a primary emotion stirred up by the Civil War: longing for home.  White soldiers constantly talked in their letters about wanting to go home, African-Americans had much more vexing longings for home, and the single most popular song for soldiers on both sides was "Home, Sweet Home," (see Susan J. Matt's book, Homesickness: An American History). As much as they wanted to, though, almost nobody could get back home. Most soldiers were afraid to desert the army for fear of losing their honor, so they stayed in the war...and, during its long down times, played lots of baseball. Soldiers from far-flung states with idle time in camp spread enthusiasm for the game and standardized its rules of play. The Civil War's silent battlefield signals with hand gestures were even turned into baseball's sign system, more or less the same system used by pitchers, catchers, and other players today (see Paul Dickson's The Hidden Language of Baseball, p. 24-34). Baseball as we know it today owes a lot to the Civil War. Standing at the plate today, all these years later, a batter still embodies the central dilemma of a soldier in the Civil War: the attempt to "balance the competing demands of a love of home and a desire for honor" (Matt, p. 77).

Painting by Otto Boetticher, "Union Prisoners [playing baseball] at Salisbury, N.C."

After the war, the feelings of homesickness turned into nostalgia, a longing for a home that could never be fully recovered. During the late 1800s, this sense of nostalgia rose as American society got roiled by racist segregation, urbanization, industrialization, migration, immigration, and other social changes. Not coincidentally, baseball, a game that is all about trying to go home, continued to rise in popularity during this same period. During this traumatic war and its aftermath, baseball became America's "national game," attempting to create imagery that could unite large parts of a deeply divided and wounded country. (See, for example, George Kirsch's book about the interweaving of baseball, the Civil War, and patriotism, Baseball in Blue and Gray.)

So when you play, watch, and enjoy baseball today, you're essentially viewing the Civil War through the refracted lens of ritual, play, and art. Of course, few people today are literally thinking of the Civil War when they watch or play baseball. But even if you don't know anything about baseball's historical origins, you still understand the courage and honor it takes to stand up to a fastball thrown inches away from your body. And you can imagine what it's like to want to get off the battlefield and go home. As George Carlin said, "I just want to go home! I hope I'll be safe at home!"

One of the few people to write about baseball's violent core was former MLB Commissioner Giamatti, who said baseball consists of a man standing on a hill throwing a rock at a man below him holding a club (Giamatti, A Great and Glorious Game, 1998, p. 58). More recently, this New Yorker cartoon came up with a similar Paleolithic comparison:

"A lot has happened since your last at-bat."

(By John Fistere, finalist for Caption Contest, July 30, 2018)

   
Like Carlin's comedy riff, this New Yorker cartoon builds on a truth not often talked about: violence is part of baseball's subtext. (I hope I'll be safe at home!)


Related posts:

All posts about baseball, including posts on my baseball fanatic cousin who got ALS, sliding and rebellion, the foul ball,  the catch and sharing, feeling good in crowds, and Basketball vs. football.

Football vs. Basketball as American Rituals

To understand the cultural difference between American football and basketball, we need to look at their underlying geometric forms.

Football is all about lines: players start every play by forming a line on the field, and then try to move the ball past the next line. The whole field is divided up into yard lines, and the fundamental objective of the game is to cross one really important line: the goal line.

Basketball, on the other hand, is more focused on circles: putting a rubber circle inside a slightly larger, metal circle. Instead of yard lines, the basketball court is divided up into the center circle, the 3-point line (a semi-circle), and the foul circle at the top of the key. And the players keep running around in circles, trying to get open for a pass.

Lines vs. circles—that’s a key difference between these two sports. But how do these geometric forms reflect contrasting aspects of American culture and economy?


Credit:Flckr, calaggie Tom Langston


Credit: Flckr, Sewanee Univ of South

Basically, the lines in football reflect a hierarchical model of authority. Coaches, quarterbacks, and coordinators control every play. With masterful strategies, they coordinate the actions of a large number of specialized actors (punter, receiver, linebacker, etc.). Thus, the game is oriented around lines, which form a visual image of coordinated control, the visual counterpart to common metaphors like "stay in line" and "lines of authority" (have you ever heard anyone call it “circles of authority”?).

Basketball, by contrast, reflects a more democratic model of spontaneous teamwork. The basketball coach cannot even intervene in most plays. Basketball is about role flexibility and fast-paced improvisation. Whereas football strictly separates the offense and defense and gives each player a specialized, single role, every basketball player shoots, passes, and plays defense. Basketball's more democratic type of play is, fittingly, more circular than linear.

Moreover, these differing geometric forms reflect the economic structures most prominent when each sport rose into prominence. Football reflects America’s hierarchical, industrial economy and military after WWII, whereas basketball emerges from the more recent and flexible information economy. Football is modeled on a large corporation, basketball on a small business.


Not that the founders of basketball and football consciously thought about all this when they started playing these games. They were just tinkering, trying out new sports, the same way other young people are doing right now in an isolated gym or field. It's hard to imagine, but at that time nobody really thought that football and basketball would become two of the most popular sports in the U.S. But over time play oriented around lines and circles just felt right to increasingly large numbers of people. Yes, basketball and football are fun to play and watch, but fun does not happen in a vacuum. Fun, too, is shaped by our culture and economy.  

Further reading and support for the highly condensed interpretations presented here:

Arens, W. “Professional Football: An American Symbol and Ritual.” In The American Dimension, Arens and Montague, eds., Alfred Publishing, 1976. A wonderful, early anthropological essay on football, with insight into things like football’s resonance with labor specialization in postwar America.

Carlin, George “Baseball vs. Football.” Carlin’s famous stand-up comedy routine is funny, insightful, and another source of inspiration here.

Geertz, Clifford “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973. An extremely influential example of interpretive anthropology’s method as applied to a cockfight, though, curiously, it never led to as many anthropological studies of sports as you would have expected.

"Green Fissures." This blog post makes an interesting, insightful point about the measuring chain in football: "The referees are just guessing where to put the ball on each down. And yet when it gets close, they bring out the chain to measure it. Everyone agrees to this practice, agreeing to this basic fundamental fraud. But this is kind of how ideology functions, with guess work and excuses. We pardon these flaws because we know that to question the error as a fraud would cripple the whole enterprise."

Mandelbaum, Michael The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do, Public Affairs, 2005. Mandelbaum is a professor of foreign policy, and also the son of the late, great anthropologist David Mandelbaum, a fact that becomes apparent in the anthropologically-minded sections of the book where he insightfully and persuasively connects sports with underlying economic structures. If you've only got time to read one anthropological book about sports, I would make it this one.

Sutton, David, and Peter Wogan Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies, Berg, 2009. Many of the ideas in this post emerge from our chapter on “Field of Dreams,” where we focus on baseball, lines, and social control.

Wogan, Peter Magical Writing in Salasaca: Literary and Power in Highland Ecuador. Westview, 2004. Researching and writing this book about Ecuador first got me thinking about lines as social control, especially lines in written paper.

Note: A longer version of this essay originally appeared on February 3, 2011 on Anthropologyworks.com, titled "Tackle This: Football as an American Ritual."