Class Divided On The Baseball Mega-Stadium

Sports are often identified as a utopian medium for escapism and entertainment, and yet fans still widely recognize that the romantic “love of the game” can be infringed upon by the murky political and economic realities of the business. For nearly a century, baseball owners have meticulously constructed the composition of their audience by tinkering with the public’s accessibility to the ballpark, as well as the affordability of the tickets to the game. 

At the beginning of the 20^th century, baseball, a self-prescribed democratic sport that valued all social and economic groups, was directed towards the white-collar fans that could access the stadium (there is also a lot of hypocrisy in a so called democratic sport that excludes players based upon their race). However, in the 1920s, society glorified extravagance and social amusement, and sports spectatorship became a spectacle for mass consumption. Attempts were made to bring all-black baseball teams to the country’s major urban centers, although baseball still lacked its self-purported democratic basis because black teams remained reliant on renting white major league parks, and having games set up with white semi-pro clubs. More pronounced even today than in the past, baseball stadiums are no longer a place to merely watch a game, but are commercial enterprises that are divided based upon class, rather than being open to the democratic masses for communal gatherings.

In the consumer-driven economy of the 1920s, sports acted as the most prominent public sphere of leisure and entertainment for the masses. As national demographics shifted towards northern cities, baseball became an escape from the rigors of monotonous mechanized industrialization for an expanding middle class in the United States. Baseball acted as form of cheap amusement for a consumer culture. In his terrific piece for Outside The Lines on the evolution of the accessibility to the ballpark, Wright Thompson pointed out, “[owners] never raised prices during the boom of the 1920s" to keep sporting events within a manageable price range.

In response to urbanization, baseball acted as a source of communal identity, and stadiums were built in cities to function as a collective gathering of urban dwellers. A news clipping from the New York Amsterdam News recalled about a Negro League game at Yankee Stadium in the early 1930s: “Jersey will send over a vast army of rooters... Newark is a baseball town and Harlem is certain to be flooded with folks.” As entire cities like Newark began to congregate around the spectacle of a baseball game, individual identities became defined by their relationship to mass society and the social identification of an individual became connected to the larger community. Large crowds accumulated at baseball events as a form of social gathering, even as recently as the early 2000s, as Thompson said “ten years ago, it was cheaper to go to a baseball game than to a movie in half of the big league markets" because baseball stadiums accommodated the democratic masses. 

As black communities funneled into cities, the Negro Leagues were designed to function as a mechanism of collective unification. The games created a space for black enclaves within a segregated society. Gus Greenlee wanted to share the Randalls Island Stadium with the Yankees because as a news clipping from the New York Amsterdam News described, “reports of the move stimulated the keen interest of local diamonds fans... and [would] undoubtedly inject a tonic into the Harlem diamond scene.” He wanted to capitalize on the sporting interest of the growing black community in the city by using one of the largest local baseball stadiums.

However, despite the democratization of the baseball viewing experience, and its formation as the fulcrum of urban residential life, Negro League teams remained at the will of white stadium support and financial sponsorship due to their inability to solidify independent stadium deals. Neil Lanctot wrote in hapter one of his terrific book Negro League Baseball that Hamtramck Stadium in Detroit “was inconvenient for black fans because of its Hamtramck location [5 miles from central Detroit] and was controlled by John Roesink, an unpopular white promoter.” Black sports fans resented playing at white major league ballparks, and felt ostracized by the institutional white control of stadiums, which often alienated black teams from their most loyal city supporters.

While baseball still ostensibly acts as a symbol of American democratic values, baseball attendance today is highly restrictive to wealthy Americans, and caters to those that have the finances to access the luxurious stadiums. As teams have become increasingly preoccupied with short-term profit rather than with long-term fan loyalty and democratized consumption, the upper class has become the only group that can attend games on a regular basis. Season tickets for the New York Yankees Legends Suite in the eight row of Section 014A cost just under $50,000 for a single seat (not to mention the extra expenses that are inevitable with going to a ballgame like buying team merchandise). Fans need to have a sizeable disposable income to be a regular at sporting events in a major city.

Thompson noted during his experience within the Legends Suite at Yankee Stadium: “I can see the masses moving back and forth beyond the glass wall,” implying that even when “regular fans” can afford a ticket, stadiums have conspicuously been constructed to differentiate the luxury seats of the rich from the masses. Fans have always felt a connection to their team, even during difficult economic times, but the commodification of tickets, and the division of the supporters, has shattered the collective fan engagement.

The Dining Room inside the Legends Suite Club at Yankee Stadium

The business of sports has inhibited fan nostalgia, as Thompson said that an individual was not [paying] because he didn't have the money, but because a bond had been broken." Stadiums now act as a status symbol of power, as boxes and club seats have created an environment catering to the financially privileged. 

Thompson argued, “We see examples of the collapsing middle class," and cited an observation from pollster Rich Luker that, "The lower the income, the less they’re enjoying sports.” Baseball has been circumscribing its own fan base because the lower and middle class less frequently experience the thrills of the baseball stadium. Ballparks are no longer a place for communal identity formation because the democratic masses have been classified as surplus supporters to the teams.

Baseball stadiums today are representative of the commercialization of sports, as retro ballparks to watch games have been replaced by gaudy mega-stadiums that act as a shrine to the prosperity of the sport, the league, or to the specific owner (Jerry World comes to mind). The aquarium at Marlins Park and the swimming pool at Chase Field in Phoenix, which can be rented for $6,500 a game, shows how contemporary stadiums have become more opulent than ever before. 

The Party Pool at Chase Field, a site of controversy in 2013 when the Dodgers players jumped in the pool after clinching the NL West Title.

Marlins Park aquarium seats are too expensive for the ordinary fan, yet taxpayers publicly financed the stadium, which happens so often in sports unless the team is owned by Stan Kroenke, in which case he will just pay for the entire thing. In his piece on "The End of the Retro Ballpark" Barry Petchesky commented how, for ballparks, “excess is the new excess." Stadiums are no longer traditional sporting venues that produce nostalgia and communal formations, but are regarded as sporting exhibitions of ostentatious modernity for an upper-class audience.

Rembert Browne wrote in a piece for Grantland about the planned move of the Atlanta Braves to Cobb County in the Northern suburbs of Atlanta, “people will go to great lengths to not live among undesirables." As cities have become overpopulated with poorer minority groups, not only have wealthier residents moved into the suburbs, but baseball parks are now moving away from the urban people that others classify as “undesirables.”

The Atlanta Braves are moving their stadium closer to the majority of their season ticket holders in the Atlanta suburbs.

Browne said, “suburbs are where you may go to either self-segregate or distance yourself from others." The Braves move from Turner Field in downtown Atlanta to SunTrust Park symbolizes their attempt to distance the team from the downtrodden urban environment and embrace the glitzy suburban modernity. Browne commented on the hypocrisy of the Braves official team statement addressed to all their fans about the move, “The ‘you, our fans’ is not targeted at a person who lives in the city of Atlanta. It’s targeted at everyone… that lives in the city’s northern suburbs." Only fans in the suburbs have the wealth to value the team’s commercialism, and therefore the club is more concerned about providing their product to those specific consumers. While that may be sound business, it does not seem right to me.