retired numbers and ancestors, little leaguers and the unborn

I made my first contact with my site of ethnographic research this week, attending two baseball games at The Epicenter in Rancho Cucamonga, watching the Quakes take on the Inland Empire 66ers of San Bernardino (seriously, what is it with these Southern California baseball teams and their names containing prepositional phrases?). It was quite a different experience to spend a baseball game mostly watching the crowd rather than watching the action on the field.

I was pretty surprised by the atmosphere of the game; on Thursday it seemed more like a scene for people to hang out rather than a place to watch baseball. This fits pretty well with the culture of The Kook, as confirmed by one of my roommates who grew up in the area and has been to numerous Quakes games. Sunday was better, as the stadium was full of Little League teams and young families. Ironically, the Quakes dominated the 66ers on the lackadaisical day but lost pretty sloppily when the real fans and kids were in attendance. Oh well.

I haven't made any contacts with Quakes fans to talk about personal connections to the team yet, so I did "participant observation" for my first two games. The most intriguing hypothesis I have after my initial contact follows:


The Ancestors and The Unborn in Baseball

One of the books I am reading for my "Understanding Human Spirituality and Culture" class is Understanding Folk Religion by Paul Hiebert, Daniel Shaw, and Tite Tiénou. In a chapter on finding meaning in life and death, the authors describe of linkage societies, which are societies where people "see themselves not as seperate, autonomous individuals, but as initimately interconnected nodes in large webs of kinship" (p. 104). In other words, in these communities there is no "individual" as Westerners tend to understand it; people derive their identity from being part of the endless flow of the community.

Two very important figures in these communities are the ancestors and the unborn. When people pass away, they do not cease to be or go off to some remote afterlife, but they remain actively involved in the life of the community. This is where practices such as the veneration of ancestors come into play in many contexts. They must be consulted before making serious decisions, and their legacy must be keep alive and respected by the family and the community. Similarly, those who are to come later on must be seriously considered and respected, because they are the ones who will keep your memory alive when you are (hopefully) an ancestor one day.

Hiebert, Shaw, and Tiénou summarize it as follows:

"The concept of linkage provides people with a sense of meaning by giving them a clear identity and security. They are not individuals who happen to live in families - they exist only because they exist in families, clans, and communities. These groups give birth to people, raise them, marry them, give them land, help them raise their children, feed them when they have no food, transform them into ancestors, and immortalize them by remembering them when they are gone" (p. 106).


And this has what, exactly, to do with baseball? I'm glad you inquired.


The Quakes have been dealing with tragedy this season, as one of their former players, Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart, died with two others when they were hit by a drunk driver a few weeks ago. He was 22 years old and died only a few hours after he had pitched an excellent game at Angel Stadium with his family in attendance. Adenhart played for Rancho Cucamonga in 2006, so it has been just a few years since he was with the team.

The Quakes are remembering Adenhart several ways this season. On the left field line, the number 28 is written (his number with the Quakes), and on the right field line is the number 34 (his number with the Angels). Most of the ushers and stadium staff wear pins with the number 34, and the team has a black #34 patch on their jerseys.

Jersey numbers carry a special significance in baseball. Just last week all of Major League Baseball honored Jackie Robinson by having every player in the league wear his #42, which was retired from usage by the entire league in 1997. My Astros have retired nine jersey numbers, two in honor of players who passed away while with the team. Just this season the café in Minute Maid Park's center field was rechristened "The FiveSeven Grille," in recognition of Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, #5 and #7, two players who became synonymous with Houston baseball in the last two decades.

Honors such as number retirement strike me as baseball's answer to the veneration of the ancestors. It is pretty typical to speak of players reaching "immortality" - the likes of Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Roberto Clemente and Nolan Ryan might be the patron saints of the sport, or perhaps more accurately the Parthenon of gods. With the controversies of the Steroids Era many of the heroes of this baseball generation, the likes of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens, have taken severe hits to their reputations, and unless something significant changes none of them will likely make it into the Hall of Fame. The real sting of that rebuke is that they are being denied their ancestorhood, reduced to lonely spirits like Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson before them, forced to aimlessly walk the earth. (That may sound overly dramatic, but it probably doesn't if you've read some of the baseball message boards I have and seen how many people really feel about steroid users.)

Commemoration is immortality. If you've seen The Sandlot, you may remember the words of the ghost of Babe Ruth to young Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez: "Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered but legends never die."

So, if the veneration of ancestors is a crucial element of baseball culture, where does respect for the unborn emerge?

At both Quakes games I have attended, a local Little League baseball team was brought onto the field with the home team at the start of the game. As the starting lineups were announced and the players ran onto the field, each starter was accompanied by one or two of the Little Leaguers, running alongside the professional players and standing next to them during the national anthem. The boys carefully watched the professionals during the anthem, emulating their positions and postures. This was even more apparent on Sunday, when numerous Little League teams were present. After the game all children were invited to run the bases, getting the chance to experience the feel of running around an actual baseball diamond at a real stadium.

Baseball teams, whether Major or Minor League, seem very aware that if they don't win over the youngest generation, the sport will die out. Why else would colorful mascots, endless freebies, and player autographs be such integral parts of the ballpark experience? In the minors, I noticed a distinct decorum regarding foul balls - if there's a youngster nearby and you catch a foul ball, you must give it to him or her. If you don't, the crowd will boo you relentlessly until you give in, focusing their attention on the culprit instead of the game. Yes, children are important.

It seems that the little leaguers and other young fans are much like the unborn members of a linkage community. They may not fully understand the game yet, but they are watching and learning. The older members of the community know that they represent the future fans, and some of them even represent the future ballplayers. Some of those little leaguers may well be starting their own journeys toward eventual ancestorhood in the religion of baseball.

Next time you're at a baseball game, look around at your surroundings. The saints of old are looking down and the youngest generation is looking up. Everything that happens on the field is juxtaposed between teams of old and teams to come, fond memories and exciting possibilities. Without the history and the future, the baseball game itself is meaningless. It is this context that makes it real, and possibly even transcendent.

Look around at your next sporting event, and let me know if you agree or if I'm just being completely ridiculous.

from the world to the desert

In the last three weeks, I have experienced professional baseball in its extremes of glory.

In late March, my sister and I attended the final game of the 2009 World Baseball Classic, the deciding match between the national teams of Korea and Japan at Dodger Stadium, joining in with a raucous group of 50,000-plus fans from across the world. Yesterday, three friends I attended the first game of the 2009 California League baseball season, the opening match between the Lancaster JetHawks (a Houston Astros affiliate) and High Desert Mavericks (a Seattle Mariners affiliate) at Stater Bros. Field in Adelanto, joining in with a raucous group of 2,000-or-so fans in the middle of the desert. It was a study in contrasts and commonalities, from the lower levels of the minor leagues to an international tournament.

The World Baseball Classic final exceeded my high expectations, as the East Asian powers played a small ball style of the game that saw a tight pitcher's duel that lasted ten innings. Our section was overwhelmingly Korean, and the fans were insane from the moment we entered the stadium. The Korean pitchers walked from the dugout to the bullpen during warm-ups, and the crowd gave them a standing ovation. I can't recall ever seeing that in another ballgame. I cheered along with our section for the Korean team, trying my best to chant along in Korean, but Japan prevailed in the 10th inning off a hit by Ichiro Suzuki. Regardless, it was obvious why these two teams were in the final - I suspect you could probably take just about any guy on either team and put him in the majors, and he'd have a respectable, if not outstanding, career.

Yesterday's game in the desert did not provide the same compelling style of play, but was almost as much fun. One of our group was a girl from Alberta who knows next to nothing about baseball; the other three of us were two committed Astros fans and a committed Cubs fan, so we did our best to educate her in the ways of the sport. One of the principal lessons came in the seventh inning, when she was surprised that everyone in the stadium knew the words to the song that was played. All the elements of minor league eccentricities were well in vogue: the booster club wearing shirts that read "BEER WE GO JETHAWKS," kids running across the field for in-between-innings entertainment, the family sitting right by home plate with K cards to keep track of the strikeouts, coupons for free doughnuts being given to anyone who caught a foul ball, and so on. I've never been a minors game, but it was a great experience; my JetHawks lost, but I did get to see the Astros' #1 prospect, catcher Jason Castro, in action. I think he could easily be playing at a higher level, and expect he'll move up pretty quickly. Hopefully he's the real deal - the Astros need the help!


I'm fascinated by baseball fandom. Maybe that's simply because I'm a fan myself and I get surprised at how emotionally invested I become and how significant my devotion to the Astros is for my daily lifestyle. For the Korean and Japanese fans at the WBC, I'm sure the game provided a chance for community watching their own favorite players and style of the game while cheering with their fellow fans in their heart language - it wasn't just a game, it was a taste of home. For the Mavericks and JetHawks fans, I suspect that minor league baseball provides a refuge of the game away from the extra drama of the big league stage, where steroids and big salaries and franchise players leaving via free agency aren't part of the equation. For me, rooting for the Astros connects me to my family and my hometown - it's much bigger than just cheering for a bunch of men I don't personally know who happen to wear stars on their hats.

For this reason, I have made baseball the focus of a project I am doing this quarter at Fuller. I am taking a class called "Understanding Human Spirituality and Culture," and for our class project we have to identify a local spiritual context, visit it, make so connections with the devotees, and study how people in that context pursue a spiritual context through their rites and rituals. We could choose an established religious venue like a temple, church or mosque, or we could pick something unrelated to organized religion instead.

The choice for me was fairly obvious: I'll be going to minor league baseball games.

The closest team is the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, so I'll be heading to several of their games and looking for how the seemingly secular act of coming together to watch young men play a boy's game reflects spiritual desires and cultural assumptions. I've already done some preliminary research, and a wealth of writing has been done on baseball as American civil religion, baseball superstitions as magic ritual, baseball stadiums as sacred spaces, and so on. I've wanted to look into this topic for a while, and this provides the perfect opportunity.

I'll be sure to let y'all know what I discover about the followers of Quakes baseball. I'm sure I'll discover quite a bit about myself in the process.