Progressive Political News

The Los Angeles Dodgers have been crowned World Series champions, and Donald Trump has been elected to another term as President of the United States. That makes the latest World Series something even more poignant than it otherwise would have been. It is difficult to even pretend that we have a national pastime in a country where we live in two alternate realities, and one of them is quite comfortable with Nazis and fascism.

Baseball has always attempted to play the role of national uniter. But in 2024, it takes more than the James Earl Jones speech in Field of Dreams to get people to sing “Kumbaya.” Yet while baseball sees itself as a unifying force, it has always played a contradictory role in our society. It has, in its history, been a symbol of segregation and, in the form of Jackie Robinson, sacrifice, integration, and inspiration. Franchises had quotas on players of color well into the 1960s, yet by the 1970s, some teams could actually field an all-Black and Afro-Latino lineup.

Baseball is a sport of epic heroes, like Roberto Clemente, and snarling villains, like Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Today, it is a platform that has introduced the public to a generation of superstars from Japan, South Korea, and across Latin America. In the country’s current viciously anti-immigrant climate, this proud public face of global diversity, and its impact, should not go unnoticed.

This is nothing new. The idea of national unity was central to the first professional league’s founding. Baseball emerged as a professional sport in the aftermath of the Civil War, during which soldiers were known to have played. The people who launched this new league—a group that included sporting goods pioneer and ace marketeer Albert G. Spalding—wanted to appeal to the idea of a new United States. They even conjured the founding myth that prominent Union Army General Abner Doubleday “invented” the sport up in Cooperstown, New York. Yet the game did not derive from that hallowed site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead, it was given many of the rules that still exist today by Alexander Cartwright. And the place where he came up with the first rule book? Hoboken, New Jersey.

Baseball had been known as the national pastime since the middle of the nineteenth century, so named in a handwritten letter to New York’s Sunday Mercury that was signed merely as “A Baseball Lover.” It proudly held that title for more than a century. It was the most popular sport in the country, and its stars were national heroes rivaled only by Hollywood.

When men—Black and white—went off to war in 1941, women played in the All-American Girls in addition to working in the factories. Then, of course, the battle to integrate the national pastime mirrored the fight brewing in the Jim Crow South in the aftermath of the war. It was no coincidence that in 1947, when baseball was finally integrated, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey made sure his choice, Jackie Robinson, was a veteran. Even in the 1960s, when everyone seemed so divided, there were teams like Bob Gibson’s Cardinals or the 1969 Miracle Mets that had the ability to capture the national imagination.

Today’s cultural consumption could not be more different. There is no national imagination, in part because the battle for our smartphone-addled attention has never been so overwhelming. There is so much to watch or engage with or comment on that we end up isolating ourselves in our own mini-niches. If there is one sport gasping the last breath of the monoculture, it is not baseball, but rather football. Baseball remains a robust sport, but at the professional level, it is no longer national. It is regional. Fans know the players on their own teams but, broadly, don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of every player on every team as in the olden days.

As a regional sport, the national pastime has managed to survive and, in many markets, even thrive. But the idea of anything being “national” as long as a fascist movement stalks the halls of power and the streets is a pipe dream.

Maybe we won’t survive as a country. But those who want to preserve the union are weaker due to baseball’s inability today to play the role it once did. Its professional creation was born out of a need for unity following the Civil War. Today, its absence from the national consciousness hampers our ability to wield it against division. We are weaker for its absence. 

On December 31, 2024, I stared at the ocean past Puerto Rico’s Piñones Beach. It was the anniversary of the day when, fifty-two years ago, Roberto Clemente’s plane went down just past the Piñones as he attempted to deliver food and medicine to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua. 

Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza, had looted previous planes sent by Clemente, which were loaded with aid and medicine. The renowned baseball player believed his presence as a Latin American icon would pressure Somoza’s thugs to back off so that the aid could be distributed to those who desperately needed it. 

I think a great deal about what was going through Clemente’s mind when he woke up on the morning of New Years Eve, preparing to board that flight, not knowing that he would never live to see 1973. He was thirty-eight years old, at the height of his career, and surrounded by the love of his family and community—and he still boarded that plane, even with a crippling fear of flying, because he didn’t see another way. “When your time comes, it comes. If you are going to die, you will die,” he reportedly told his wife, Vera, who tried to stop him from going. “And babies are dying. They need these supplies.”

Clemente’s solidarity with the less fortunate came from his life experience. Born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1934, young Clemente was a tempest of baseball talent. In 1954, he was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, joining their minor league team and traveling in the Jim Crow South—a place where he later said he had learned for the first time that he was Black.

But even with the Dodgers—Jackie Robinson’s team—a dark-skinned, Latin American player only just starting to learn English was going to struggle to get to the big leagues. Disregarded by Brooklyn, Clemente ended up in blue-collar Pittsburgh, where he became an improbable icon. With perhaps the greatest throwing arm in history, Clemente was beloved for his artistry on the field, winning twelve straight Gold Glove awards, leading the 1960s in hits, and playing on two World Series-winning teams. In his final game in 1972, he achieved his 3,000th base hit. 

In Puerto Rico, Clemente was the ultimate sports trailblazer. He was the first player from the Caribbean and Latin America to win a World Series as a starter; the first to win a Most Valuable Player Award; and the first to win a World Series MVP.

Clemente was also beloved in Puerto Rico for never forgetting his roots, putting money back into his community with a focus on the poor. He was most comfortable off his pedestal, walking with the masses. He made people proud to be from Latin America, refusing to be rebranded as “Bobby Clemente” and insisting to be known as Roberto. He was a union leader who successfully fought to delay the start of the 1968 season following the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. 

Clemente was blessed to be married to his great love Vera, with whom he raised their three sons. And yet he still got on that plane. 

One wonders what he would have thought on December 31, 2024, looking back from the waters at Puerto Rico over my shoulders. Power was out across the island; the privatized electrical grid had short-circuited before Nuevo Año parties could commence. The landscape looked like a Lite Brite grid of haves and have nots, with a cacophony of buzzing generators maintaining electricity for some while most rang in the new year in near total darkness. The glaring inequality would have enraged Clemente, who always demanded that workers and the poor receive dignity and assistance.

Clemente would have seen this patchwork of lights from the ocean as the face of an island in turmoil. He’d have heard that the Puerto Rican people were slandered as “garbage” at a rally of the winning U.S. presidential candidate; a candidate whose wealth, waste, and white nationalism is anathema to the principles that defined Clemente’s life. He would have seen Puerto Rico elect a leadership that supported this candidacy. He would see this political maelstrom of hate and division capture the mind of his own son, who campaigned for an autocrat who sees Puerto Rico as a punchline. He would have seen other members of his family express disgust at his son’s actions. For a man who believed in Latin American unity—a man from Puerto Rico who died trying to save lives in Nicaragua—seeing his own family divided over a racist billionaire would surely be heartbreaking. 

We don’t need Clemente with us in order to feel devastated by this state of affairs: an island in near darkness, a family divided, a legacy fighting to be heard beyond statues or sanctification. As I turned away from Piñones beach one last time, I had to think that Clemente at this moment would care less about us remembering how he died, and more about how he had lived: with a fierce pride meant to inspire anyone who might need to look their boss in the eye and say, “Don’t call me Bobby. My name is Roberto.”

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