Parallels in popularity
by Trey Nosrac
Turn off your phone.
Turn off your television.
Turn off your iPad.
Close your eyes.
Imagine that it is springtime in America. The year is 1949. Sixty-one professional baseball leagues, including the two major leagues, prepare to play the grand old game. Four hundred and fifty-seven professional minor league teams in four hundred and fifty-seven cities across the forty-eight states await the new season. Big Stone Gap, Virginia, home to the Big Stone Gap Rebels in the Mountain State League, is preparing to take the field. What fun that must have been for the townsfolk to gather at Bullitt Park to watch the game against the visiting Oak Ridge Bombers from Tennessee.
1949 also marked the beginning of the golden age of harness horse racing, with large crowds at racetracks such as Yonkers and Roosevelt. Harness horse racing operated in a dozen states. Daily newspapers ran headlines that featured harness horses and participants. In 1949, many Americans were familiar with racehorses like Good Times, Rodney, and Victory Song.
This post–World War II boom saw record attendance, optimism, and community involvement. Both sports were riding high. Then, both sports began to slip and slipped rather quickly.
Fewer than twenty baseball leagues remained a dozen years after the apex of professional baseball and harness horse racing. The harness racing footprint lessened. Today, minor league baseball and harness horse racing are in holding patterns, trying to adapt and adjust to the internet and new technology.
What factors led to the rapid contraction of baseball leagues and harness horse racing? Like many things, the reasons for the decline and lack of a resurrection are straightforward.
Television is/was a huge factor. At the close of the 1940s, baseball fans could watch ball games at home on blurry black and white screens in their living rooms. Both sports had their audiences diluted by Ed Sullivan, Dragnet, and Bonanza. Then cars and roads led to an automobile culture and the growth of the suburbs.
These booming middle grounds between the big cities and the small towns created a new and different culture. The car culture complicated leisure activities like bowling leagues, bridge clubs, and organized sports like Little League. The Korean War had some effect, as did the rapid growth of professional football and basketball.
In 1949, Americans were more communal. When harness racing and low-level baseball thrived, the fan bases consisted of people you knew, and the locations were close, which allowed people to interact. Devices did not prevent us from socializing.
The Big Stone Gap Rebels’ attendance figures tell a story of this tipping point in American entertainment activities. During their first season of 1949, 36,000 fans, about 1,000 per home game, watched the Rebels, which was impressive for a city with a population of 4,011.
In the following few years, the same years as television exploded on the scene, attendance at the ballpark slipped by half each year, and the business model collapsed in a few years. Today, the headwinds against local in-person engagement are far greater than those against television.
What about the next twenty-five or fifty years for these sports? Imagine ten years from now. Our attachment to devices today already feels out of control; shortly, devices and algorithms will command the tunes we will dance to.
I believe that pockets of resistance will take hold in America. At least a solid percentage of Americans will mindfully create time for purposeful disconnection from devices. They will realize that reconnection to some relics from days of yore will occur. People will learn that, as Roger Huston has said thousands of times, “being there” is healthy and makes a fuller life.
If the resistance is powerful enough, a local baseball game could become a popular destination again. An in-person harness race program could become a viable destination. Visits to horse farms to watch or drive could hold appeal. A bowling league could return as a pastime. Dozens of places with fellow humans may return if there is a revolt from mindless manipulation.
Let’s hope our sport with magnificent horses trotting around attractive ovals can hang on. We have an asset in that many facets of our sport touch our senses and fill our minds. If we are innovative, creative, and resolute, we can fill a void and become a viable option for people who do not want to disappear in the cloud.
“Viva la Révolution”
