Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture

by David McGimpsey

"... McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack (several of which are aimed at his beloved, and beleaguered, Montreal Expos). Literary baseball may be a drastically over-analyzed subject, but, like an overachieving rookie, McGrimpsey produces a far better book on it than one would have ever thought possible." ―Louis Jacobson, Washington Post "This is the most important critical book on baseball literature in many years." ―Murray Sperber, author of Onward to Victory From Field of Dreams to The Natural, from baseball cards to highbrow fiction, this book explores the place of baseball in American popular culture.

Genres: Baseball

208 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2000

About the author

David has a PhD in English Literature. Writes a regular humour column called "The Self-Esteem Workout" for Matrix. and the "Sandwich of the Month" column for EnRoute magazine. David is a songwriter and musician, and member of the rock band Puggy Hammer. He is the Montreal fiction editor of the e-magazine Joyland and is the fiction editor for the Punchy Writers Series at DC Books. David was named by the CBC as one of the "Top Ten English-Language Poets in Canada". David currently teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University. excerpts from Li'l Bastard 2011

Reviews

[William]

I finally read this entire book. I had read the introduction several times and actually quoted from it in academic things I had written, including my dissertation, but I had never actually read through the thing entirely.

McGimpsey and I certainly share some things--we both feel like baseball-related culutre (literature, film, music, etc., etc.) is best looked at all together as baseball-related "cultural texts" rather than as just literature, just film, etc. The real cultural dialogue or discourse crosses those divisions of genre and form. And we both agree that all of this stuff is also best looked in the context of the game of baseball as it is played, especially the U.S.'s Major Leagues. Baseball fiction has a lot of baseball history in it and vice versa.

But we also have some differences, and I think these can mostly be chalked up to the fact that McGimpsey seems to be more in tune with that old fellow Karl Marx than I am. His readings of texts tend to emphasize how they echo dominant ideologies, support existing social institutions, etc. He's interested in talking about tradition as mostly a bad thing, I tend to see it as a neutral or a potentially good thing.

This divergence is probably most obvious in the way McGimpsey talks about nostalgia in baseball texts. For him it always seems to be about conservative socio-political values, with longing for or a celebration of an imaginary wholesome America that never existed. And sure, there can certainly be that dimension to some texts, but I think this kind of reading is pretty narrow, and is overly politicized. I see the nostalgia more in what I would call "human" terms, with adults looking back on childhood with fondness, recognizing that all those things they thought were so important as young adults just out of college maybe aren't all that all-consumingly pressing and essential as they thought, that maybe their parents weren't so terrible, and maybe they have more in common with mom and dad than they thought when they were twenty-four.

This certainly happened in the 1980s, with baby boomers rolling back some of their strident demands for remaking the world that characterized the late '60s and bore fruit in the '70s, some of which, if you ask me, grew over-ripe and rotten. In the '80s, they kind of turned into their parents. And a renewed enthusiasm for baseball kind of got used as a symbol for this change for some (see Field of Dreams, The Natural).

And I see this as part of the circle of life more than a political sell-out, but it seems like most academics would disagree with me. They love to talk about the entirety of the 1980's as being an extension of the Reagan administration. That seems like such an easy claim--"Oh, it was the Reagan era, so of course we liked movies with a manly, adventurous archaeologist hero, or with a somewhat clear-cut good vs. evil space opera plot reminiscent of old-timey matinee serials, or movies where the protagonist actually goes back to the 1950s; they're all manifestations of the conservative political era the Great Communicator ushered in. . ."

Except this cultural nostalgia or reversal or whatever you want to call it actually pre-dated Reagan. Star Wars came out in '77; ballpark attendance and World Series viewership started going up in the mid '70s. I see it as a broad cultural trend, with politics just being one manifestation of it. If anything, Reagan is an appendage of Star Wars rather than the other way around. Also, academics seem particularly adept at ignoring how much cultural hybridization goes on in these nostalgic texts. (Ray Kinsella never abandons his hippie values, even if he does reconcile with his father's ghost. Similarly, we can see the strong feminist notes in Carrie Fisher and Karen Allen's respective performances as Princess Leia and Marian Ravenwood. I could go on.)

To make a long story short (Too late!), for my taste, McGimpsey and many other academics (And really, many of them are way worse in this regard than McGimpsey.) tend to be too political and politically-motivated in the way they analyze culture from the 1980s, especially texts from the '80s/early '90s baseball lit. and film boom, and to some degree, baseball-related cultural texts general. That's how I see it, anyway.

Sorry about that lengthy tangent. As you can see, his discussion of nostalgia was the bit that solicited the strongest reaction in me, but nostalgia isn't the only focus of the book. McGimpsey is also very interested in this idea of baseball as being uniquely, transcendentally special and American, more so than other sports. (Really his discussion of nostalgia is in some ways an appendage of that theme.) I'm not 100% in agreement with his arguments regarding that supposed mystical goodness of baseball, either, but it's mostly his tone I'm not in love with on that matter. He mostly makes good points, but to me, he comes off as a little bit snarky while doing it.

All that said, I must give McGimpsey due credit for how well he outlines the key themes that continually surface and resurface in baseball texts: the idea of a national character, inclusion and exclusion in American society/culture, the pastoral, innocence and corruption, and fathers and sons. He may be a bit more cynical about these tendencies than I prefer to be, but he does excellent work in delineating them.

This one is probably not for the casual reader or even hard-core baseball fans, but mostly for the handful of people with an academic, analytical interested in baseball-related books and movies. All five of you should read it, even if you don't agree with every last argument.

And really, on that note, I owe McGimpsey some thanks for thinking and caring about these things that I also think and care about. Sorry they moved your Expos! But those tricolour hats will live on forever!