3
who goes out to the ballgame and who doesn’t?

If you miss your favorite N.F.L. team’s game, you have to wait a week. In baseball, you wait a day.

THOMAS BOSWELL, Washington Post, 1987

It cannot be said often enough that to predict the death of baseball because one young writer longs for movie dialogue to fill in the “silences” of a long at-bat would probably turn out to be every bit as silly as the 1925 prediction in the Sporting News that listening to baseball on radio was tantamount to waving a white flag of American cultural surrender. But the aging of baseball’s audience—in a culture that requires no one to endure a waking moment without visual stimulation or noise—poses a unique demographic challenge that did not exist during the Roaring Twenties or in any predigital era. In 2015, according to Nielsen’s annual year-in-sports report, approximately 59 percent of fans for national baseball television broadcasts were over fifty. Fewer than 47 percent of National Basketball Association fans fell into the same group.1 In 2016, the estimated median age for all fans watching nationally televised baseball games was fifty-six.2

I am using the term “major,” as it is generally used by the venerable rating firm Nielsen, to include M.L.B., the N.B.A., the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. Sports like golf, tennis, and soccer have ardent followings—soccer, in particular, has a growing male and female audience in the United States—but nevertheless reflect more specialized tastes than the four most broadly popular sports. An important caveat must be applied to consumption—and I use the word “consumption” deliberately—of all sports programming on all devices, ranging from traditional television to the newest iterations of the iPhone and iPad. The media landscape is changing so rapidly that direct year-to-year comparisons are difficult to make and would often be misleading. In 2017, Nielsen Sports released an analysis indicating that a staggering 78 percent of sports fans globally go online regularly while also watching sports on television.3 Statistical breakdowns are not yet sophisticated enough to reveal whether these people are watching another sporting event online simultaneously, talking about the same game on Twitter or other social media, or doing something else entirely. Nielsen does estimate, however, that sports drive more than half of all conversations about television programs on Twitter.4 This fragmented viewing pattern is bound to have a greater effect on baseball than on other major sports. I have stressed looking back on missed opportunities in the early innings as essential to making sense of later, more dramatic turning points. Any baseball game is a process, not a series of disjointed, disconnected events. The digital world is not about process but about instant delivery of results, so it is logical that younger viewers find it more difficult to focus on baseball than on faster-paced games like basketball, with its continuous action and frequent scoring.

The aging of baseball’s audience is related to so many complex social forces outside the game that it requires a separate analysis transcending baseball’s other demographic anomalies.5 The graying of the fan base is also a sensitive subject with baseball people, many of whom refused to talk about the subject on the record. Few of the lords of baseball are as candid as Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ managing partner, who has acknowledged that one of the best-known franchises in any sport has had great difficulty attracting younger fans in recent years. “We recognized in looking at our fan base,” he said, “we recognized in looking at our viewers on YES [the Yankees’ local cable network], that that age group is not what it could be and not what it should be.”6 This remained true at the start of the 2017 season, despite the fact that the Yankees were off to a fast start, which provided a showcase for sparkling young players like catcher Gary Sánchez and outfielder Aaron Judge—a great baseball name if ever there was one. Inevitably, Yankees management swiftly designated an eighteen-seat section in the right-field stands—with a close-up view of Judge’s position on the field—as “the Judge’s chambers.” Fans selected for the special seats deck themselves out in costumes designed to look like judicial robes. Just as inevitably, fans in the left-field stands—the sweet spot for any right-handed slugger in that ballpark—now call their own seats the Judge’s chambers. If Judge continues to hit home runs as he did in his rookie season, there may be an entire stadium filled with fans in black robes.

Young people are as susceptible as older fans to baseball events that deliver special excitement. Buried in the gleeful reports by Fox Sports of record-setting audiences for the 2016 Cubs-Indians World Series was an increase among school-age viewers that outstripped the hefty increase among all fans. The average nightly audience increased by nearly 60 percent over the audience for the 2014 series, which also lasted seven games, between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals. But among boys from twelve to seventeen, the audience more than doubled.7 This is a crucial demographic for the future of any sport, because real fans are almost always formed at some stage of childhood or adolescence. It remains to be seen whether the excitement of a high-tension World Series will carry over into future years and generate enthusiasm for more routine games. In 2015, viewers under seventeen made up only 6.8 percent of audiences for nationally televised games. It may be of even greater importance that viewers from ages eighteen to through thirty-four made up only 14.5 percent of the same audience.8 That is why baseball’s median age for national broadcasts is closer to sixty than fifty.

Of course, these figures do not answer the question of how many young people are watching baseball games, and how much of the games they watch, on mobile devices and through time-shifting technology that enables them to view as much or as little of a game whenever they want. Despite the increase in time shifting, Stephen Master, managing director for Nielsen Sports, says that the vast majority of athletic events are still viewed live. This conclusion reflects a decadelong trend. In 2015, sports accounted for 93 of the top 100 programs seen live on television—compared with only 14 of the top 100 in 2005.9 The migration of quality television series to cable and streaming services may have a good deal to do with this change. A public accustomed to binge-watching dramas and tales of the supernatural still wants to see the outcome of real athletic competition in real time. Binge-watching the 2016 Cubs-Indians World Series at your own convenience, when the outcome is already known, certainly removes suspense from the sports equation (although I suspect that some Cubs fans, at least, will want to revisit the highlights in winters to come).

It is also important to recognize that baseball has a unique business model in which a large share of income is derived from local cable broadcasts, with the cable stations owned in part or wholly by the team. Although baseball trails the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. in national ratings, its local broadcasts dominate the market in many cities.

Whether games are experienced at the park, on television and radio, or on various mobile devices, the average age of fans would be considerably higher if it were not for a rise in the number of Hispanic fans that parallels the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States. The estimated median age of Hispanic viewers of national baseball telecasts in 2016 was only fifty-one—five years younger than the baseball audience as a whole. A breakdown of the numbers from 2015 shows why. More than 36 percent of Hispanic viewers of national telecasts were under thirty-five, compared with only 21 percent for the audience as a whole.10 One of the most startling Nielsen statistics is a 30 percent rise in Hispanic viewership of English-language World Series broadcasts in 2015 (when the Kansas City Royals beat the Mets in five games) from 2014 (when the Royals lost to the San Francisco Giants in seven).11 New York is a much larger market than San Francisco, but Hispanic viewership of regular-season broadcasts, in both English and Spanish, is up throughout the county.

It makes historical sense that more young Americans of Hispanic descent are watching baseball on English-language television. In the 1920s and 1930s, a similar rise in enthusiasm for baseball took place among descendants of Italian and east European Jewish immigrants (as well as among first-generation immigrants themselves, for whom baseball was one pathway into American culture). My grandmother, born in 1899 and the daughter of German immigrants, became a fan not only because of my grandfather’s influence but because she was captivated by the career of Lou Gehrig, born in 1903 to German immigrant parents in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan. Even though Gehrig played for the hated Yankees, Gran recalled, she had always cheered when he batted against the Sox in Chicago.

The presence of so many Latinos in baseball—they have made up 25–30 percent of M.L.B. players in recent years—presumably has the same impact on Hispanic Americans as Gehrig did on my grandmother and the desegregation of baseball did on black American fans in the 1950s. At this point in American history, with the Hispanic-American population growing as a result of continuing immigration from Latin America and the increase in the number of American-born descendants of immigrants, the definition of Hispanic is more complex than, say, the definition of an American Jew or an Italian American was in my grandmother’s generation. That is true whether one is talking about self-definition or definition of ethnicity by outsiders. That complexity is reflected in the preferences of Hispanic Americans regarding English- and Spanish-language broadcasts (in baseball and other sports). It is no surprise that ESPN Deportes, which broadcasts some 4,500 hours of live Spanish-language sporting events each year, has found that Hispanics gravitate to soccer in Spanish. First-generation immigrants grew up playing and watching soccer in their native lands, and many still root for their favorite teams. American football, by contrast, is often watched by the same people in English—simply because football is identified not with their native countries but with the United States. Baseball is different, because it has a passionate following and cultural roots in both Latin America and the United States.

“When you speak about baseball, it speaks to Latinos on both sides of their being,” explains Freddy Rolón, vice president and general manager of ESPN Deportes. “There is a question of identity and how it is mixed between your country of birth and the country you are part of and you live in.”12 Moreover, the Hispanic audience as identified by Nielsen includes many second- and third-generation Americans whose dominant language is English and whose ethnically based emotional ties to baseball may, like my grandmother’s, have little to do with real ties to an ancestor’s native country. My grandmother’s love for Gehrig was based not on any atavistic attachment to Germany but on her pleasure at the success of someone whose background was similar to hers. In similar fashion, the American-born child or grandchild of Hispanic immigrants might idolize Albert Pujols, David Ortiz, or Pedro Martínez while watching the game in English rather than Spanish. In 2015, when Martínez was inducted into the Hall of Fame, on what was Father’s Day in the Dominican Republic, he delivered a bilingual acceptance speech that reduced many in the Cooperstown audience to tears.

That baseball speaks to both sides of an American with a Hispanic heritage is an asset rather than a liability for American baseball. “I never feel more American than when I’m watching baseball,” says a young friend of mine, a doctor who was born in New York after his parents immigrated (legally) from the Dominican Republic in 1975. “I watch in English because I think in English, but I get an extra kick from seeing Latino players on the field. Part of it is that with all of the disrespectful talk about immigrants today, I know it means a lot to my parents to see us represented in what Americans call their ‘national pastime.’ Which my parents think is a real joke, since they always considered it the Dominican national pastime. They came with green cards, and it took them eleven years to go through the whole process to become citizens.”

If the increase in young Hispanic-American fans is one of baseball’s brightest demographic spots, the tepid interest of young African Americans (especially in comparison with their enthusiasm for basketball) is a serious problem. During the 2015 season, only one in five African Americans who tuned into national baseball broadcasts was under thirty-five—compared with more than one in three Hispanics.

The diminution of interest in baseball on the part of young African Americans is, in some measure, attributable to the same social factors that have made many young white (non-Hispanic) Americans call the game “boring.” There is no racial segregation when it comes to the shortening of attention spans. Yet in entirely predictable fashion, there is no shortage of white people trying to provide some special, race-related explanation for the erosion of the fan base among people to whom baseball meant a great deal both before and after the color line was breached in 1947.

Some studies and scholars attempt to connect the decline of black participation in baseball with “broken homes” headed by single mothers and the dearth of “fathers playing catch with sons.” In the conservative Christian magazine Canon and Culture, Evan Lenow, an assistant professor of ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, even suggests that absent fathers are the main reason why black teenagers choose basketball over baseball. “Basketball requires a hoop and a ball,” he writes. “A child can work on the game by himself. Baseball, on the other hand, requires more than one person.” Specifically, baseball requires fathers, who are “especially important to boys.”13

I wish Lenow had been with me last summer in the park near my New York apartment, where I sat down after my morning walk and watched a young mother who lives in my building throwing a ball to her four-year-old son. He had an excellent batting stance for a child so young and made solid contact repeatedly. As it happens, this little boy also has a very-much-present father, but it certainly seems that mothers can play catch with sons too. That is, unless one is determined to blame baseball’s twenty-first-century problems, like so much else, on changes in women’s and men’s roles that disturb the most conservative evangelical Christians.

I would also suggest that there is more enlightenment to be gained on this subject by listening to African Americans than to whites.

Chris Rock, in a 2015 interview with Bryant Gumbel, called himself, a black baseball fan, part of “an endangered species.” Rock, who was born in 1965, ticked off a list of reasons why young African Americans are not as involved with baseball as he was when he was growing up. Guess what? Not one of those reasons has anything to do with single mothers. Many of them have to do with the drop in the number of black players in the major leagues since the 1980s. When Rock was coming of age in New York City, the 1986 Mets won the World Series with a team that included several black players who were fan favorites—Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Kevin Mitchell, and Mookie Wilson. Wilson was genuinely beloved not only because he was an excellent player who worked ceaselessly to make the most of his talents but because of the obvious joy he displayed on the field. In the interview, aired on HBO, Rock pointed out that the San Francisco Giants had no black players on their starting team when they won the 2014 World Series. He remarked that “the closest thing to a person of color in the stands was their mascot, a biracial seal.” Rock also pointed out that many historically black colleges, including Howard University, have sharply cut back on or dispensed with baseball programs altogether. “Yeah,” Rock said, “lacrosse is black enough for Howard, but not baseball.” Rock also cited many of the same reasons advanced by young whites for their boredom with baseball—including the idea that the game moves too slowly for today’s culture.14

Of all these explanations, which also appear frequently on sports blogs by black writers, the one that makes the most sense is the decline in the number of African-American players since the late 1980s. I became a conscious baseball fan during the first decade after desegregation, but some of my most vivid youthful images of individual players involve African Americans—Robinson, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Larry Doby. (Doby was the second black player to break the color barrier—with the Cleveland Indians—and played for my White Sox for the better part of the 1956 and 1957 seasons.) The best pitcher I have ever seen personally (by my definition of “best,” which means the most relentless competitor) was Bob Gibson, the man whose earned run average was so low that it forced M.L.B. to raise the mound in 1969 to give hitters a chance. Many other African-American players have a permanent place in my memory: Roy Campanella, Henry Aaron, Ozzie Smith, and Reggie Jackson—to name only a few. But these are stars from the past. There is no question that the most important black athletes in recent years—the kind of athletes who enable African-American kids to look up and see themselves—have been in other sports. Baseball today has no LeBron James, no Serena or Venus Williams. As Derrick Clifton, a writer who grew up on Chicago’s South Side recalls, there is no substitute—for creating fans or amateurs who enjoy a sport—for seeing athletes of high achievement who enable you to imagine doing what they do.

And on a personal level, although I’m far from a professional tennis player, I once dreamed about that possibility. As a kid who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, I didn’t see or notice much about tennis; I was being pushed toward basketball or football. That’s until I happened upon Venus playing in the 2000 Wimbledon finals against Lindsay Davenport.…

After I saw Venus win, I thought, “Maybe I can play that sport some day.” Many of my friends would say something similar after watching the Williams sisters in their youth, as they aged along with them.15

It is of more than passing interest, in view of the decline in the number of African-American baseball players since the 1980s, that Derrick Clifton was being pushed toward basketball and football—not baseball—in his black neighborhood on the South Side. Somehow, this does not strike me as the doing of single moms and absent dads. Tony Clark, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, argues that “unfortunately, the MO of our industry has been to promote its teams rather than its stars.”16 Clark is right about that, but rooting for the home team has been a bigger part of the culture of baseball since the beginning than of any other sport. I am not sure, had a hometown superstar in baseball done what James did—leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for four years to play for the Miami Heat—that he would have been welcomed back to Cleveland with the overwhelming enthusiasm James enjoyed in 2014.* But James—like many of basketball’s and football’s biggest names—is a national figure. There may not have been anyone in baseball like him since Babe Ruth. Also, there is a bias among baseball lifers against stars who are seen as “hot dogs” seeking the limelight for themselves and not their teams. Disdain for the hot dog player runs counter to a celebrity culture that exerts its hold on the young even more strongly than on older Americans. Then too, the bias of baseball’s traditionalists against “styling”—such as “showing up” a pitcher by prancing around the bases with obvious, arrogant delight—does not sit well with fans under thirty-five. Americans of many generations enjoy styling. Face it, we are a country that likes seeing football players pound the ball—and one another—in the end zone. And most of us don’t much care if a pitcher who has just given up a home run (at least, if the pitcher is on the other team) is “shown up” by a satisfied hitter. This is a game, after all, not the negotiation of some dreary business merger. What’s not to like about a player who has just hit a home run pouncing emphatically on the plate, joyously doffing his cap to the fans, and throwing a kiss to women in the stands?

*Actually, James was born in Akron, Ohio, not in Cleveland—but the two cities are close enough to make him a homegrown hero.

One interesting element in the story of the steady decline in the proportion of black major league baseball players since the late 1980s appears in a study published by the Society for American Baseball Research, a group of scholars and writers who have made a great contribution to understanding the game by the numbers. While the percentage of black players rose steadily between 1948 and the late 1980s, it was never as large as reported in many sports articles. The figure that used to be cited for African-American players in the 1980s was around 30 percent; in fact, it was closer to 19 percent. The reason: dark-skinned Hispanic players were counted as “black”—by baseball as well as outside analysts.17 The longtime practice of judging a player’s ethnicity purely by skin color is one nasty way in which baseball was indeed just like American life. There is no question, though, that the percentage of African-American players has dropped sharply since the early 1990s. In 1986, African Americans made up 18.3 percent of players on opening-day rosters; in 2017, the figure was 7.7 percent.18

M.L.B. cannot escape its share of responsibility for the drop in African-American participation since the 1980s, because it is cheaper to train and sign young players in Latin American countries than in the United States. Rock did make one feckless, uninformed comment in his interview when he dismissed the expense of baseball training for teenagers as a factor in the decline of black participation. He observed that poor Dominicans play baseball and that the “only equipment they have are twigs for bats, diapers for gloves and Haitians for bases.”19 Perhaps Rock was thinking of toddlers when he was talking about “diapers for gloves,” because the most talented Dominican teenagers have access to academies financed by all American major league clubs.

Although the decline in the proportion of African-American players is a perennial bad news story in baseball, there are some signs that the trend may be changing. According to figures provided by Pat Courtney, assistant to Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred, nine of thirty-six first-round draft picks in 2015 were African American—the largest proportion since 1992. M.L.B. attributes a significant part of this increase to the impact of its urban youth academies. Manfred expects the results of the youth academy training to be felt at the major league level within the next few years. If the programs continue to produce more first-round draft picks, there are likely to be more African Americans on opening-day rosters by, say, 2020. “To call this a high priority would be an understatement,” Manfred says. “It’s important for teams, it’s important for attracting new fans.”20 The 7.7 percent of African-American players on opening-day rosters in 2017 was up a full percentage point from 2016—a number worth mentioning if only because it suggests much-needed movement in the right direction.

Women are another demographic sore spot for baseball, which has a smaller proportion of female fans than any other major sport. This is a genuinely baffling phenomenon, since girls and young women are much more involved with all sports than at any time in the past.

Many more women watch nationally televised football during the regular season than baseball (6.2 million compared with 141,000 in 2015). The total audience for football is much larger than for baseball, but even on a percentage basis, baseball has the smallest share of female fans of any major sport. According to the National Football League, women make up approximately 45 percent of the sport’s huge fan base. Year after year, the Super Bowl is the single most watched television program by women as well as men.21

I admit that I don’t get it. Why on earth should NASCAR have a higher proportion of female fans than baseball? (Don’t tell me it’s because girls just love hot cars.) The failure of baseball to attract more female fans, at a time when girls are more interested than previous generations in a wide variety of sports, is a mystery that must be solved if baseball is to maintain its status in the future—not necessarily as the national pastime but as one of the nation’s most important and emotionally resonant pastimes.

I once introduced a brilliant Russian-born scientist to baseball, and it took him a full year before he understood enough to enjoy the play on the field with anything like the gusto of someone whose summers were once defined by rhythms translated into numbers in daily box scores. Later he became a serious fan—more Catholic than the pope in his devotion to what still, in the early 1970s, seemed like the most meaningful ritual of his adopted country. He thanked me but admitted that he would never have persevered in his baseball education had I not been his first American girlfriend. “I thought you had to understand this game to please American women,” he confessed. “It’s the thinking person’s game, and I just assumed it would appeal to women who want cleverness instead of violence out of a sport.”

I found this an interesting observation from someone looking at baseball from the outside, and he was surprised to find that very few of the women he met had any interest in baseball. That girls are unlikely to play baseball at the professional level is irrelevant: women are certainly not going to play N.F.L. football or N.H.L. hockey in their current forms. Basketball and soccer, of course, are quite different, because women can and do play both sports at a high professional level (even though they do not make as much money as men). But people become sports fans not because they really believe (at least after, say, age twelve) that they are going to play professionally but because they became interested in and often played the game as a child. Young girls play both softball and hardball—at least before pushy parents and coaches start taking over in middle school and telling the children to get serious about the future. The At Bat program for children of all ages throughout the country, sponsored by M.L.B. and USA Baseball (the governing body of amateur sports) is designed to teach children how to have fun playing games that involve catching, throwing, and hitting—from wiffle ball to hardball. The emphasis is on playing rather than winning (in contrast to tightly structured programs like Little League).

There is one enormously powerful and logical reason why baseball could and should appeal to a larger female base: it is a much safer game than either football or hockey for children who participate in sports. The publicity about concussions in football, not only in the N.F.L. but at the high school level, is already having an impact on the willingness of parents (fathers as well as mothers) to allow their sons to play high school football. Donald Trump mocks concern about concussions as an example of the sissification of America and has called the N.F.L. “weak” for instituting new rules to protect players who display concussion symptoms.22 However, ordinary middle-class parents—including some famous former N.F.L. players suffering the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury—don’t feel that way. Baseball occasionally produces concussions, but, unlike football, is not designed to be a bruising contact sport. When concussions do happen in baseball, they happen by accident—because someone has made a mistake—rather than as the inevitable result of the way the game is played. The quotient of built-in physical combat in football and hockey (though not in basketball) is much higher than that of baseball at both the middle school and high school level. Mothers (even those with jobs, pace Canon and Culture) still do more of the driving than fathers to practice sessions for their children, and I would be nauseated after dropping off my son at a practice where he could be at risk for a serious head injury. Knowing what we know today about the effect of concussions on young teenagers, I am proud that my parents refused to let my younger brother, who was unusually small for his age, play football when he entered high school. They had the courage of their convictions before there was medical proof, and it wasn’t easy to say no in central Michigan’s football-saturated environment. It is easier to say no today because there is medical proof, and baseball should make that a selling point for mothers and fathers.

The estrangement of many women from baseball (like the attitudes of many young African Americans toward the game) cannot be divorced from history. The pieces of history affecting women are not as well known as the racial and racist history of the game, and they are surely unknown to most Americans under forty. The baseball establishment’s long history of inhospitality to female members of the media, and much of the male media’s denigration of female fans and women’s knowledge of the game, should not be overlooked. Roger Angell, chronicling baseball for the New Yorker, was one of the few writers to explore this subject with depth and sensitivity in the 1970s. At that time, female sportswriters, inspired by the twentieth-century wave of American feminism, were fighting for the right to interview players in locker rooms. (The issue eventually had to be resolved in court.) They encountered much stronger resistance from baseball players than from professional hockey or basketball players. Baseball’s long season, with games played nearly every day (half of them on the road) for six months, places players in an all-male world for much longer periods than any other sport. There was a strong tradition of “what happens on the road stays on the road,” and female reporters were seen by many players and managers as potential Trojan horses who either would tattle on cheating husbands to their wives at home or would distract players from their job by seducing them. Players who wanted their wives to travel with them, even to postseason games, were often mocked. In 1979, Angell wrote:

It seems to me that the people who run sports and who claim to be most concerned about the “sexual privacy” of their athletes in the clubhouse—surely one of the most sexless and joyless surroundings in which men and women can meet—are men who want to keep both sports and sex in some safe, special place where they first locked them up when they were adolescents. The new presence of capable, complicated women in the inner places of sports means that relations between the sexes cannot be relegated just to marriage, or just to hotel rooms either.23

I saw what the first generation of female baseball writers endured during the 1970s and 1980s, and I am glad that many of the young women I know find these stories difficult to believe. Claire Smith, now a respected news editor for ESPN, was awarded the highest honor of the Baseball Writers Association of America—the J. G. Taylor Spink Award—and then honored in the summer of 2017 at the Baseball Hall of Fame for her “meritorious contributions to sportswriting.” The recognition came thirty-two years after Smith, then a baseball writer for the Hartford Courant, had been barred from the San Diego Padres’ clubhouse after the first game of the 1984 National League Championship Series with the Cubs. Fearful that she would miss her deadline, Smith was crying and sent a message to the Padres’ Steve Garvey, who had opposed banning female reporters from the locker room. Garvey came outside to talk to her. Kristie Ackert of the New York Daily News, one of five female members of the Baseball Writers’ Association whom Smith asked to stand with her when she received the Spink Award, recounts that Garvey told Smith not to cry—“that she was just doing her job and despite what happened, she had the right to [do her work] and had plenty of support.”24 Smith persevered, and she was a pioneer not only as a woman but as an African-American baseball writer on many newspapers. “In New York, she paved the way for me,” writes Ackert, who now covers the Mets for the News. “And she paid an enormous emotional price.”25

The disdain with which many male baseball writers used to regard women as fans and as reporters was expressed by the late Jerome Holtzman, a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times who was considered the unofficial “dean of sportswriters” by his contemporary colleagues. “The press box used to be a male preserve—that was its charm,” Holtzman said. “I’d rather not have a woman as a seatmate at a World Series game. It wouldn’t be as much fun. I never met a woman who knew as much baseball as a man.”26 It hurt me to read that; it made me wonder whether some of the men who went to games with me felt the same way. It hurt so much that I was able to find the quotation immediately in a thick book I had not looked at for decades.

I don’t know how many men today—and men still control most of the history and management of major league baseball—share Holtzman’s views, and there has certainly been a decline in sex discrimination in every aspect of sports since the 1980s. I suspect, however, that the lingering odor of such sentiments does have an effect even on young women who have never been exposed personally to the blatant sexism faced by Claire Smith’s generation of baseball-loving females. It is possible to feel like an outsider (or perhaps someone who has only one foot in the door) even though an institution’s social policies and the attitudes of the participants have changed.

In fact, some antifemale attitudes—on the part of both fans and those who run the game’s finances and broadcasting—have persisted in ways that might make a woman feel that this is 1958, not 2018. On the occasion of Smith’s Spink Award, Doug Glanville, a former outfielder for the Cubs, Phillies, and Texas Rangers and a former color analyst on baseball for ESPN, wrote a remarkably frank column in the New York Times about the sexism directed at his colleague Jessica Mendoza in the broadcast booth. He observed that Mendoza, an Olympic gold medalist in softball, never has the advantage of beginning any sentence in the broadcast booth with, “When I played for the Chicago Cubs.” Mendoza, who is highly respected by her broadcasting colleagues, constantly attracts comments on social media implying that she knows nothing about the game because she never played in the major leagues. Among the comments reported by Glanville: “She doesn’t belong in the booth with men discussing a game she knows nothing about. It’s like watching a game with a girlfriend.” Glanville makes the telling observation that while Mendoza is often dismissed by envious social media couch potatoes because she never played major league ball, countless male sportscasters—among them the legendary Vin Scully—also never played the game at any demanding amateur, much less professional, level. In two particularly eloquent paragraphs, Glanville summed up the attitude that baseball needs to project in order to attract more female fans:

Sports, on and off the field, should set an example for fairness, decency and humanity for all of our children, not just the legacy of boys already in the boys club. Sports are loved by so many of us, and we need to appreciate that everyone has a story to tell about the games we love. Yes, women too.

I don’t know whether Jessica Mendoza will become the next Vin Scully. Even Vin Scully didn’t know he would be the next Vin Scully. But I would like to give trailblazers a chance to make it happen, because they move mountains—and people, some of whom have had to overcome significant obstacles. In Cooperstown, after decades of male faces on the wall of Spink Award recipients, Claire Smith’s face will now shift history.27

The men who run baseball today do recognize the economic importance of female fans—particularly when it comes to ballpark attendance. “Every study tells us that women control discretionary spending on recreation for families,” says Manfred. “That means baseball games. We want women to come to games with their families for that obvious reason, apart from the fact that we want baseball to have the widest and most diverse audience possible. And when moms come to the ballpark, a lot more kids come too. Again, it’s obvious.” The enthusiasm with which both male and female fans greeted the star performance of fourteen-year-old Mo’ne Davis—one of two girls to play in the 2014 Little League World Series—gives a hint of the possibilities that M.L.B. could develop. Even though it is unlikely that a woman will ever play major league baseball, human beings of both sexes can understand and love a game because it embodies multiple possibilities of excellence. A woman’s place is in a major league ballpark, just as a man’s place is in a tennis stadium watching Serena Williams.

The definition of a true fan is not someone who finds it imperative to go out to the ballgame once—or even more times—a week. No one ever had the chance to be that kind of fan unless he or she was retired or possessed considerable wealth; at the height of my enthusiasm for the Mets in the 1980s, when I shared a season ticket, I never went to more than seven games in a season. I watched many more games on television or listened to them on radio in the middle of the night when the team was on the West Coast. For the most part—unless there was a crucial series—I watched or listened to no more than two games a week. It is possible to be too much of a fan—to be addicted to sports in passive, couch-potato fashion. In 2015–16, according to Nielsen, Americans spent a “shocking” number of hours—more than 31 billion—viewing athletic events on television. Shocking is the right word—and that figure does not include any of the time people spend viewing games, or more likely moments of games, on mobile devices. But there is no evidence that viewing or listening to games away from the ballpark has ever discouraged people from attending live games. Go to a ballpark anywhere in the country (unless you happen to live on Chicago’s North Side, on a block that is only a ten-minute walk from Wrigley Field), and you are committing yourself to a long commute in addition to the three-hour game. Getting out to Citi Field, the home of the Mets, takes about an hour by subway from where I live in Manhattan (that is, if there are no signal breakdowns on the Lexington Avenue line, which I must take to Grand Central Terminal to change for the Flushing line to the Mets’ ballpark in Flushing, Queens). Need I add that the ride seems even longer after a loss? (This expedition proved to be a bit too challenging for some of the men who attended the 2017 convention of the Society for American Baseball Research in New York. The New York Times reported some of the grumbling by the sabermetricians about having to take the subway, and the article was accompanied by a hilarious picture of a panel whose attendees seemed to consist almost entirely of middle-aged white men with paunches.)28

The availability of television to watch games in the comfort of my own home has never discouraged me from attending live games, which provide a very different visual and emotional experience. Instead, I have always been grateful that live games are only one choice enabling me to follow the sport I love, at times when going out to the ballpark is literally impossible.

Even when I was a child, attending games with my grandparents fed my appetite for taking in games on radio and television at home, and vice versa. Baseball fans, it must be acknowledged, include more than a few snobs who talk as if the only “real” way to watch a game were at the park and who pretend that they never, ever turn from the news to a sports channel, flop on the couch, and tune out a chaotic, lawless world for a time in order to watch a world with well-defined rules. There is a pretentiousness about this resembling the rigorous nostalgia of Jacques Barzun when he rejected baseball in the 1990s because the business, if not the actual game, did not comport with his memories of America in the 1950s. Baseball is hospitable to fans in a wide variety of formats and platforms (how easily digital language seeps into a sentence about a nondigital subject), but the game cannot prosper in the future as it prospers today if it does not attract the fans who are missing not only from ballparks but from the camaraderie of watching with friends and family in their own homes. A truly American game cannot be the province mainly of old white men—whether on the field or in the stands. I think of what Buck O’Neil, a star first baseman and manager in the American Negro League and the first black coach in major league baseball, said at Satchel Paige’s funeral in 1982. In his eulogy, O’Neil addressed one pointed sentence to white Americans: “Don’t feel sorry for us,” he said, speaking about all of the great black players who were barred from major league baseball before 1947. “I feel sorry for your fathers and mothers, because they didn’t get to see us play.”29 What O’Neil had to say about the baseball fan base in an era of involuntary exclusion can be turned around and applied just as aptly to the voluntary exclusion that circumscribes the audience in so many ways today—by race, ethnicity, age and gender. Numbers can lie, but in this instance they tell the truth.