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A Prig's Point of View

Chi-Sox and us: Exploring intersections among baseball, American history and campus politics

Dan Prignitz '06

Watching the White Sox clinch the World Series title in Game 4 last week, like many I couldn’t help but be moved by the occasion’s historically symbolic value.

Eighty-eight years had passed since the last White Sox Championship. Early in the streak in 1919 eight White Sox players agreed to take bribes to throw the World Series in what became known as the “Black Sox scandal.” The transgression led to the eight players being banned from the major leagues for life: it was, in a sense, major league baseball’s original sin, the sacrifice of immortality for money.

In fact, the scandal affected the American psyche so deeply that the character of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, one of the eight, was a central figure in the movie “Field of Dreams” 70 years later.

For 86 years after the scandal the White Sox existed in a type of sports purgatory, never winning a World Series but, perhaps worse, never gaining the fan devotion of more popular teams like the Cubs, Red Sox and Yankees. A religious person might attribute the long years of White Sox suffering to the necessary punishment of a transgressor of God’s laws.

As a baseball fan who likes to take the game much more seriously than it actually is, I would like to think that the Sox wandered the desert for nearly nine decades in penance for the willingness of a few to place financial gain over what many American children (and grown men) only dream of: a chance to win the World Series.

The scandal was not isolated in major league baseball either, as gambling and cheating have been regular occurrences among even the greatest players. Pete Rose’s expulsion from baseball for betting and the use of corked bats on the field is one example.

Perhaps this World Series represents the moral redemption of a franchise, and a part of baseball, rather than the mere superstitious redemption of the Red Sox last year in the destruction of “the curse of the Babe.”

Regardless, the Sox world championship can give us perspective on our lives as individuals and (for many of us) Americans.

This is because, in some ways, the White Sox epic and baseball in general is representative of the paradox of the American story. What I mean is institutions and people that create such enormous good have also acted in morally deplorable ways.

One doesn’t have to have too many conversations here without hearing references to American sins and hypocrisy.

The men that formed the first lasting modern republic also affirmed the rights to slavery, many holding slaves themselves. Americans have slaughtered the indigenous peoples of North America without provocation and used napalm and even nuclear weapons against civilian populations while building the most powerful nation in the world.

Add to this rampant racism, Vietnam and our government’s actions in Iraq, and it becomes obvious that we have much to feel guilty about. Like baseball and its athletes, we are not innocent and morally upright. Government policy is certainly no exception.

But I fear that our anger with that policy, especially most recently, will drive us into policy passivity or fatalism, especially with regard to foreign policy.

Such was the case following World War I, when we sort of gave up on the world with a policy of isolation.And, to top it off, managed to elect a president so hands-off as to be nicknamed “silent Cal.”

Perhaps we’ve become too caught up in the failures of our government to recognize its limited successes, such as the institution of the Millennium Development Fund over the last several years which has encouraged greater government accountability to development goals in some poor nations.

These demonstrate that, like with the White Sox, our society is capable of redemption for its moral flaws.

This could be through policies of world poverty reduction or the promotion of peaceful resolution of conflict: we have done both before in limited degrees.

In any case, we are not an inherently evil country as some may like to believe, and it is not time to write off our democracy as dead, as several posters on campus this week implied. Baseball fans (including the few Sox fans out there) by and large remain loyal and hopeful for their team’s success, even in the face of scandal and heartbreak.

While remaining critical and resilient in electoral opposition, we should do the same for our country.

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