While we often think about deviance as being a negative for society, there are many sociologists who recognize
a purpose for it. Durkhiem says that one of the four functions of deviance is to release tension, and while sporting events shouldn’t be deviant, fans do participate in deviant acts during sporting events like they wouldn’t any other place. The negative interactions that fans can have with players (like the events which led to the brawl at The Palace or Charles Barkley and the Miami fans or with each other (the Giants fan beat up in Dodgers stadium, the little kid in the Jets uniform tackled by a Browns fan represent, what we hope, is abnormal behavior in the non-sports life of sports fans. One hopes that because they have the release of the game, and the drinks and the rowdiness (or in other cultures, the hooliganism), they can control those urges in other places. I think the big question here is why are sporting events an allowable place for this? It seems as though there is historical precedence for this—the amount of rowdiness displayed by the Greek during arena fights comes to mind—but is this really why Jet fans at Gate D at Giants Stadium used to grope women and request flashing during halftime?
Archive for the 'MLB' Category
Relax…Release…
Making Private Public
C. Wright Mills encourages sociologists to make a connection between biography and history to be able to see themselves within larger societal structures. He specifically asks that social scientists connect private concerns with public issues in order to glance outside of the intricacies of individuals’ lives into the social institutions within which we exist. While the personal issues and concerns of athletes and sports teams are often aired in public, and public groups and authorities can get involved, we, as sports fans don’t make as many connections to public issues as we should. That is really much of the purpose of this blog, to bring us out of our own lives, teams and loyalties and to allow us to see the bigger pictures. Is Kobe’s homophobic slur only a public issue because it was accidentally overheard or does it represent the larger issues around sports and masculinity and the ways in which we equate homosexuality with the lack of such? Is the robot that will throw out the pitch at the Phillies game just a publicity stunt or an example of American society’s move into the biotech society that we have been promised, where we are able to use technology to overcome biological limitations? When your sociological imagination becomes second nature, we won’t have to ask these questions anymore.
Grouping Together
Nothing brings 
people together like tragedy and triumph. Nothing can more quickly turn your out group into an in-group than a grand event. So, the chants of “U-S-A!” that broke out after the American triumph during Sunday’s Mets-Phillies game among the rivals mirrored the abundance of I 
NY shirts that appeared nearly ten years ago as the Mets played another rival after September 11th. The event need not be a national moment either. The year that both the Mets and Yankees made the World Series produced a camaraderie in New York City which seemed to surprise those who weren’t around to see it. Mets fans and Yankee fans became baseball fans. And the city that had been a Yankee town for the previous few years embraced its more general baseball identity. A new in-group was formed and anyone who wasn’t a New York baseball fan, or all those people who wrote about how it was going to tear the city apart, became the new out group. At least until the games began…
Strangers in a Strange Land
Last week, the MLB announced that 27.7 percent of the league’s 846 players were foreign born. This number is up from the
previous year but not as high as the all-time high in 2005. This percentage leaves many people confused. While the percentage of foreign born players, such as those from Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic has risen, the percentage of African American players has gone down. According to the last analyzed census, African Americans and Latinos were about equal in the population (12.3 and 12.5) respectively, yet African Americans were down to 9 percent in the MLB in 2009. Latinos were 27 percent. What does this mean for baseball and African Americans? Does this speak to the globalization of baseball and the draw of the MLB to baseball players all around the world? Or is this a matter of institutional discrimination where the discrimination against African Americans is built into the baseball system because the Latinos, who are often immigrants, do not have the power to fight against the oppression they might face?
And the moral is…
According to Emile Durkheim, discipline is the first element of morality. I am reminded of this as I have read these various stories which bring to light elements of morality in college and professional sports. We know that discipline is an importa
nt part of sports—all athletes have to have the dedication to put in the work to improve their craft—but is morality? Should programs that emphasize sports also emphasize morality? Interestingly enough, the second element of morality for Durkheim is the attachment to social groups, also described as altruism. As a member of a team, professional athletes at least have the attachment necessary to work with their social group, and many of them, additionally have the altruism that leads them to start and contribute to charities. Yet, too often, we hear stories about their lack of morality. From Miguel Cabrera telling the police to shoot him,toCappie Pondexter tweeting a derogatory term for Japanese people (among other tweets) and even Jim Tressel, and his failure to notify Ohio State’s compliance officer about the potential violations of his students. Are athletes moral? Do we expect them to be? Or are they, in Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, at stage 2 (individualism) where all the good they do is for the benefit of themselves, rather than for others?
And then we have Brandon Davies dismissed from Brigham Young University’s basketball team for failure to comply with the school’s honor code. He admitted to his teammates that he had premarital sex even knowing that the result would be his dismissal. Should we wish for more of sports to uphold this level of morality? Or should we find our moral compasses in other places?
Total Authority
The aspect of the total institution is that is arguably least present in sports is the qualification that “all aspects of life are conducted in the same place under the same single authority.” Each sport has a commissioner, as well as a CBA and other rules governing the sport, and all of the players involved are expected to follow that authority. Depending on the sport, or (most often in the MLB) the team, there are rules which govern dress, action and sometimes even how conversations occur on and off the field, court or ice
Where sports escape the total institution label to some extent is that, in general, they are allowed to conduct aspects of their life outside of their sport. However, when contracts include morality clauses, players’ behavior when they are not at work becomes regulated by the same authority which governs their work.
Additionally, while football players have most of the week to be at home and live their lives as they please, basketball and especially baseball players, spend much more time on the road and often have college dorm like rules that structure their awake and sleeping times (NFL training camp is run similarly). Even in the case of football players, their lives off the court can often be scrutinized by their fans, the media and the league which has a similar effect as being constantly under that authority, as evidenced by the backlash around Roethlisberger’s night out during the super bowl week.
What do you think? Can we say that, despite the option to go home and live beyond the sight of their sport, professional athletes lives are still constantly monitored?
The Inmates and the Asylum
Like others, I heard Dick Vitale last week refer to the inmates running the asylum. This was not the first time I had heard this and while it has most recently been directed at basketball and the string of free agents who have either explicitly or implicitly directed themselves towards particular teams, I have also heard it used to describe players in the NFL whose salaries have set the market and baseball players who have made contract demands on deadlines.
For me, this brings up a couple of issues. First, the phrasing of the “inmates running the asylum” takes me immediately to Erving Goffman’s book, Asylum. In his book of essays, he talks about mental hospitals and what it means to be in a “total institution” and “live an enclosed, formally administered round of life” with “like-situated individuals.” It brought me to think about whether the characteristics of Goffman’s total institution can be applied to the business of sport and the lives of the players.
Additionally, there are the race issues. In most American sport industries, the players—the workers—are minorities (usually, African American although baseball has the unique distinction of being more Latino than African American) and the owners are not. Given this power structure, to refer to the athletes as inmates and to be offended or disgusted that they are gaining some power and “running the asylum” connects too closely with the idea of a slave revolt.
My ideas around these two issues are forming slowly and I hope to express them here over my next few posts
Learning to Trust
Once you are labeled a liar, you are treated as such. While I would like to believe that the Mets’ Wilpons knew nothing of the Ponzi scheme, simply saying that doesn’t make it so…especially when it comes from Madoff and he says it in the same interview where he calls out the banks for knowing what was going on and not caring. Sorry boys, I just don’t think Bernie’s convincing anyone.