Edgar F. Wolfe, “The Benevolent Brotherhood of Baseball Bugs”
A “Who’s Who in the Grandstand” seems to be the latest “crying need” in America—a volume which
would tell at a glance at least the job, business, trade, or profession (if any) of each one of the fans, rooters,
or bugs—call them what you will—who blithely kill thousands of grandmothers day after day in order to
get a chance to see big, and even little, league baseball teams in action. Of course our “hoi-polloi” can be
counted upon to be among those present at these games. In fact, some writers have even hinted broadly that
the attendance at a ball park consists of nothing else but “hoi-polloi,” and that the “laboring class”
dominates not only the bleachers but also the choice seats right behind the home-plate. In other words, the
rumor has gone abroad that baseball is a “poor man’s” game, and not good enough for anybody who is
anybody. News dispatches frequently tell us that this or that college has dropped baseball as a major sport
in favor of some more genteel form of athletics, such as tennis, rowing, or basketball, or football. All of
which leads Edgar F. Wolfe, writing under the pseudonym “Jim Nasium” in Sporting Life (Philadelphia) to
exclaim peevishly that “some benighted persons, whose intellect has shriveled till it rattles in their skulls
like a pea in a gourd, have the nerve to say that baseball fans are the ‘rabble of the community.’”
With typically American vigor and slang Mr. Wolfe retorts, “‘Rabble’ my eyes. They’re the soul of the
solid citizenry of the nation, that’s what they are!” He says further: “Only in that country in which baseball
is known—America—does democracy achieve a close approach to a real fact. And probably the country at
large does not fully appreciate the important part that baseball has played in this establishment. Nothing in
all history has so gripped an entire people as baseball has gripped the American nation from the highest to
the lowest; nothing has ever been known to form´such a bond of common interest between men of all
ranks. Its great value to the nation and individuals as a whole is that of a connecting link between the
classes.” By way of elaborating his views, he continues:
Men may be far apart in their stations in life, but that one common interest draws them together in human
sympathy. Capital and Labor may have their own private differences, but they unite in “rooting” for the
same ball club, forget their selfish ends in discussing a subject that holds a common interest for both.
It makes human beings out of those who would otherwise be self-centered fops. As a bond of brotherhood
it has every fraternal organization ever invented whipt to a whisper, because its scope is wider—the
average fraternal organization being a class institution in itself, while every mother’s son from banker to
bum is eligible for membership in the Benevolent Brotherhood of Baseball Bugs.
The popular fallacy seems to be that baseball fans are confined almost exclusively to the laboring classes. It
is a common mistake of writers who should know better to assert that the working class—the ordinary
“hands” of the factories, mills and industrial plants, are the principal financial support of our great national
pastime, and even baseball club owners labor under this delusion and place undue importance on the
arranging of their sitting time to suit the working hours of the laboring class. Publications devoted to
baseball are continually met by the mistaken assertion of advertising space buyers that “baseball fans do
not constitute the buying public.” There seems to exist a popular delusion to the effect that baseball interest
is more rife among the so-called “lower classes” than it is among the higher type of business man—in other
word, that baseball “fans” are the rabble of the community, in spite of every evidence that goes to prove
that the biggest percentage of baseball “fans” is really found among the leaders in the marts of trade and the
social world.
As a matter of real fact, the financial support of baseball is provided by the so-called “moneyed class” and
NOT by the “working class” to whom that honor is too frequently accorded. We have no hesitation in
declaring that if an accurate poll were taken of the attendance at any big-league ball game the ratio would
be around 80 per cent. of business officials, office employees and men of leisure to 20 per cent. of the
actual “laboring class.” Take the Polo Grounds on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and compare the
bleacher attendance to that of the private boxes and higher priced grandstand seats and you will see that this
is true.
Watch the average business man as he looks over his morning paper and you will see that while he glances
over the headlines of the other pages holding the paper spread out in both hands, when he comes to the
sporting page he turns it over and begins to read, and it’s a mortal cinch that the banks, brokerage offices,
and higher type of commercial institutions provide a larger percentage of the average baseball crowd than
all factories and mills in the land. If baseball clubs had to depend upon the “laboring class” for its financial
support there wouldn’t be any $100,000 ball players or million dollar ball parks—yet they tell you that the
“laboring class constitutes the great army of baseball fans” and that "baseball fans are not the buying
public."
Source: Edgar F. Wolfe, “The Benevolent Brotherhood of Baseball Bugs,” Literary Digest, 1923.
William Carlos Williams, “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” 1921.
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—
all to no end save beauty
the eternal—
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut—
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—
The Jew gets it straight—it
is deadly, terrifying—
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly—
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought