Readings: “The Imagery of Major League Baseball”

Carson Cistulli has recently “become literate.” Allow him to celebrate his new skill by sharing selections from his reading list.

Text: “Beyond the Game: The Imagery of Major League Baseball” from Journal of Sports & Recreation, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2009. (Click here for full text.)
Author: Roy F. Fox, Professor, English Education, Univ. of Missouri
Pages: 11 (including pictures)
Pages Discussed Here: All

Discussion
Fox’s main assertion is a compelling one — namely, that the visual representation of baseball and its players has evolved significantly over the last hundred years or so. In his abstract, Fox proposes to “[illustrate] seven stages of visual representation,” as follow:

1) Focus on the game itself.
2) Focus on information about the game, itself.
3) Focus on information about the player.
4) Focus on just the player.
5) Focus on just the player’s personality.
6) Focus on entertainment that is peripheral to baseball.
7) Focus on celebrity-hood itself — the act of or the process of being famous.

Additionally, the method by which Fox proposes to undertake his study — it’s also compelling. As Fox writes,

Here, baseball cards, photographs, illustrations on Wheaties cereal boxes, advertisements, and images from internet sites constitute the primary source data. The analysis of these words and images draws upon two standard, critical methods: semiotics and general semantics. In order to “read” and interpret images, various principles from semiotics, such as repetition, association, and composition (e.g., line, color, shape) will be employed.

Semiotics, as the reader may or mayn’t know, is the study of and “reading” of signs in culture. It has the potential to be quite an exciting thing. Roland Barthes’ essay on wrestling, for example — and that spectacle’s similarities to Greek theater — is playful and illuminating. That Fox invokes this tradition is promising.

Were Fox’s intention merely to explore a few images, that would be satisfying, probably. Indeed, his choice of images to analyze is generally excellent (for example, the Ramirez image above and Hubbell below right). Unfortunately, he draws unnecessarily strong — and, occasionally, tired — conclusions.

For example, Fox states that “certain pairs of players became so closely associated with each other, that one seldom heard or read of one player without the other.” He includes images of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth together and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra together to illustrate this. Below these, we find “a typical image from Barry Bonds‘ web site” of Bonds swinging and (presumably) hitting the ball hard. “This image,” writes Fox, “is all Barry and nothing else.” For Fox, this ends the conversation conclusively.

While it’s possible that Fox’s point is entirely true — perhaps visual representations of players and their celebrity status have become prominent in our era — to actually prove such a point would require a rigor not found here. We would need numbers to prove it. For example, might we take a thousand baseball-related images at random from the 1930s and another thousand from the 2000s and record what percentage from each sample have pairs of — as opposed to individual — players? I’m not smart enough to know if that’s a large enough sample in each case, but it’d be a start, I think.

Conclusion
Compelling idea. Potentially exciting. Overambitious.