Jump off the Bandwagon

Harvard College is a veritable treasure trove of diversity. Students converge here from all 50 states and numerous foreign lands, of all sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds, with their own unique religious and cultural traditions.

Politics, too, admits of a wide range of distinction. Democrats, Republicans, and libertarians all have active contingents on campus; and despite the stultifying careerist influence of the Kennedy School, interesting political conversations can, with some effort, still be had.

Yet all this profusion of diversity—from the Association of Black Harvard Women to the Harvard College Wisconsin Club, from the Christian Adventist Fellowship to the Secular Society, from the Radcliffe Union of Students to BGLTSA—belies an oppressive and soul-crushing conformity.

Almost as soon as freshmen first arrive on campus—in between awkward theatrical performances about contraception and date-rape, and ultimately futile, furtive searches for beer—they begin to feign an interest in baseball just as the local team wraps up its season. No matter if they are from Baltimore or Bakersfield, Bucharest or Beirut, many Harvard students—for a month at least in early autumn—are rabid Red Sox fans.

As the 2008 season of our national pastime begins this month, Harvard students would do well to remember that baseball-team allegiances cannot be so credibly and honorably fabricated as, say, their recent enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. These loyalties spring from years of careful attention, affection, and devotion, season after season of heartbreak alternating, regularly but unpredictably, with triumph. These are bonds formed not only over the course of a lifetime, but inherited intact from generations that have gone before.

Before 2004, the Boston Red Sox had not won a championship since 1918—beyond the memory of most living fans at the time—while having come so perilously close on many previous occasions. One would only have to whisper the names Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner, or Aaron Boone within earshot of a Boston fan to open the floodgates on a déluge of painful memories, of golden opportunities wasted, bitter tears shed, and an entire life of constancy and devotion unrequited.

Were this sentimentalism not so pathetic, so crude, there would almost be something poetic, something tragically heroic in it. Almost.

Harvard students who have not known this experience—with its attendant misery and self-pitying sadness—cannot truly appreciate the World Series victory they only so recently saluted by their short and mindless, beer-infused revelry in the Square last October.

To some extent, this bandwagon mentality is utterly execrable in all sports. But in baseball, it is especially disgusting.

Unlike the NBA and the NFL, with their seamless integration into popular entertainment, their close affinities with the vapid celebrity culture of glossy magazines and MTV, and their nationwide audiences, professional baseball has generally remained a local affair. Teams count their most loyal devotees almost entirely within the regional base, and only seldom are regular-season games broadcast to a wider audience. Americans may, in theory, value mobility: but when it comes to baseball, carpetbagging fans, for good reason, are often shunned and scorned.

Baseball furthermore requires patience. Unlike most sports, in baseball there are no fixed time parameters and therefore no temporal obstacles for losing teams staging a comeback at the threshold of defeat. The season spans six months, with over 160 contests for each team, a time over which lengthy winning streaks can be gradually erased by tepid performance midsummer.

This requisite patience in turn counsels against the fair-weather fandom that dominates the Harvard campus annually around October—that is, if the Red Sox have had a successful season. Well-intentioned and clueless Red Sox fans on campus perhaps can be forgiven for their feigned enthusiasm, for their understandable desire to imbibe the rich froth of Boston sports culture, for their all-too-human urge to “fit in.”

But their longing to enter “Red Sox Nation”—the crypto-fascist public-relations campaign that the baseball club is currently promoting—has earned them a counterfeit citizenship. Their interest is unsubstantiated by any connection to the team’s history and traditions, the source for both the richness as well as the baseness of Red Sox fan culture. Baseball requires patience, dedication, and commitment—all values that have lost their pride of place among most Harvard students, especially those who cheer for the Sox.

If these bandwagon fans succeed in ruining the self-pitying and self-gratifying Boston Red Sox tradition, it will be no great loss. But if this trend accelerates, baseball will, like other professional sports, sink deeper into the ignominy of our soulless entertainment culture.


Christopher B. Lacaria ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.