Tradition, peanuts and Cracker Jacks

The stands at Sembower Field aren’t full.

True, it’s only about 40 degrees outside and colder yet with windchill this Sunday afternoon, but this is the home opener for the Hoosier baseball team, so it’s surprising to see only 100 or so fans in the 2,250 capacity bleachers for the team’s matchup with the Evansville Purple Aces.

Before the first pitch is even thrown, though, it’s clear that the quantity of attendees isn’t what will shape the atmosphere at the game. Baseball has been losing ground to football and basketball in game attendance and television ratings for years now; game four of last year’s World Series garnered fewer viewers than a regular season NFL game between the New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers that aired the same night, and the highest rated game in the Series had fewer than half the viewers of game seven of the 2010 NBA Finals.

These are no longer the days of skipping school and sneaking into Yankee Stadium to catch a glimpse of the Great Bambino. Hell, these aren’t even the days of turning your cap backwards so you can look like Ken Griffey Jr. Today, baseball finds itself firmly below football and basketball in terms of popularity in America.

But few would argue that baseball isn’t America’s pastime.

Travis Vogan aligns himself firmly in the camp that defends the sport’s national pastime status, even though he accepts that it’s not as popular as it once was. Vogan is a recent Ph.D. recipient in the communication and culture department who has studied the cultural history of sports in America.

“Baseball still has — and this is really a central part of the mythology of baseball — this kind of nostalgia attached to it of being so intimately linked to American identity,” Vogan said.

Tyler Hack agrees. Hack is a visiting lecturer in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, and he played four years of college baseball before becoming an assistant coach and head coach at Ohio State University at Newark and the eventual athletic director and founder of the baseball program for Ohio State University at Mansfield.

“The atmosphere is a huge part of it,” Hack said. “I went to Reds games my whole life growing up. A couple times a year, we would pile in the car and go to Reds games, and I associate those experiences with memories of childhood.”

IU baseball head coach Tracy Smith echoes these sentiments, and he paints an image of baseball with a similar romanticism to those appearing in classic works like Ernest Thayer’s poem “Casey At the Bat” and Sam Wood’s Academy Award-winning “The Pride of the Yankees.”

“There still seems to be a connection to the past,” Smith said. “America still has a place in its heart for baseball because people still identify with the simplicity of the sport. There still seems to be some humility left in the sport whereas basketball and football turned into a show.”

But despite all these dewy-eyed proclamations about baseball’s integrity and Americanism, it’s still slipping in popularity, and there must be reasons why.

One in particular — steroid use — leaps to mind immediately, and despite Major League Baseball’s best efforts to prosecute the guilty and publicly decry the practice, it still strikes Vogan as one of the key factors driving the sport’s popularity down.

“All the stuff that’s been going on lately with PEDs has made people a little bit apprehensive about the sport,” he said. “It sort of flies in the face of all the myths that baseball exemplifies.”

But that isn’t enough. It’s a surface-level observation that shouldn’t single-handedly ruin the game for anyone.

“It also seems like baseball right now is having a tough time finding stars,” Vogan said.

He went on to talk about players like Ken Griffey Jr., Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, players who were the most popular athletes in any sport at their peaks. Compare that to the 2010 season where Joey Votto and Josh Hamilton took home the two MVP trophies. Even Alex Rodriguez, arguably the biggest celebrity in the game, has had his name stained by the same steroid use that recast Sosa and McGwire as villains after they retired.

Those explanations go a long way, but they still leave out a key piece of the puzzle. In a 2010 column for ESPN.com titled “Slicing up the Red Sox’s boring pie,” Bill Simmons chalked up the biggest portion of baseball’s waning popularity to the length of the games. Since the 1970s — perhaps baseball’s last true golden age — the number of sub-two-hour games has been shrinking at almost the same alarming rate that the number of four-hour-plus games has been growing.

Hack said he has seen that trend reflected in the arguments of friends and family who don’t like to watch the sport.

“The number one complaint I get from people who don’t like baseball is that games are boring. It’s too much to sit there and watch,” he said. “But those same people will say they love going to a game and being there and experiencing the ballpark.”

Indeed, it seems much of baseball’s continuing allure is based on trappings of the game that have little to do with what takes place on the field of play. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is as memorable for its heartfelt requests for peanuts and Cracker Jacks as it is for actually paying tribute to the sport, and its lyrics are predicated entirely on the ballpark experience.

And back at Sembower Field, the faithful Hoosier fans in attendance are taking in their own corners of that experience. A father in an Orioles cap arrives slightly late but makes sure he sits in the front row with his three young sons, pointing out some of the subtleties of the game that would otherwise escape them. A woman leaves the concession stand with two hot dogs — Ball Park Franks, presumably — for herself and her husband to enjoy. An older gentleman rips into the umpires with some good-natured trash talk when he disagrees with their calls.

This is the ballpark. This is why baseball is still America’s pastime. The Hoosiers didn’t end up winning, but that’s almost secondary. There’s always another game, and with it, another opportunity to come out to the ball game, root, root, root for the home team and take part in this uniquely American experience.

If they don’t win, it’s a shame — but it’s not the end of the world.