Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve had an idea I’ve been trying to unpack and articulate, but I keep going around in circles, creeping into different topics, and getting absolutely nowhere. Instead of doing the smart thing and switching to something else, I’ve continued to bash my skull against it in hopes that it will eventually come off. It has not.
I am sharing this batch of fragments—really, it’s more of a collage than anything else—because simply presenting something (anything) will activate the GOTO→do something else code line in my personal algorithm. It doesn’t even get at what I was trying to get at (what I actually wanted to close in on was the phenomenon of metagames) and it’s pretty disjointed, but whatever. Apologies in advance.
The popular games a culture develops are a reflection of that culture’s value and modus vivendi at the time of their inception. Once adopted, they may become institutions unto themselves, and there is a dynamic process in which the elaboration of the game and the ongoing evolution of cultural practices and social institutions reciprocally condition one another.
The main thrust of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) is that play is germinative of culture and civilization. Much of the book is concerned with tracing festival, ritual, and religious practices’ genealogical connection to games in premodern societies. Over time, Huizinga says, “the play-element generally recedes into the background, being absorbed for the most part in the sacred sphere...almost completely hidden behind cultural phenomena.”
Nowadays, the process tends towards a different destination, and to other forms of systematization and seriousness.
Huizinga on the origins of modern sports:
What we are concerned with here is the transition from occasional amusement to the system of organized clubs and matches. Dutch pictures of the 17th century show us burghers and peasants intent upon their game of kolf; but, so far as I know, nothing is heard of games being organized in clubs or played as matches. It is obvious that a fixed organization of this kind will most readily occur when two groups play against one another. The great ball-games in particular require the existence of permanent teams, and herein lies the starting point of modern sport. The process arises quite spontaneously in the meeting of village against village, school against school, one part of a town against the rest, etc. That the process started in 19th-century England is understandable up to a point ... But it cannot be doubted that the structure of English social life had much to do with it. Local self-government encouraged the spirit of association and solidarity. The absence of obligatory military training favoured the occasion for, and the need of, physical exercise. The peculiar form of education tended to work in the same direction, and finally the geography of the country and the nature of the terrain, on the whole flat and, in the ubiquitous commons, offering the most perfect playing-fields that could be desired, were of the greatest importance. Thus England became the cradle and focus of modern sporting life.
Early precursors to baseball were popular amateur pastimes in England—whence they emigrated to its American colonies—in the eighteenth century. Baseball took off in the United States during the nineteenth century, and was at first a largely working-class amusement. Britannica:
The early baseball clubs such as the New York Knickerbockers were clubs in the true sense of the word: members paid dues, the emphasis was on fraternity and socializing, and baseball games were played largely among members.
The first professional league was formed in 1871. The amateur scene resented the pros. By and by, baseball became respectable. Its popularity as a spectator sport, and instatement as America’s Pastime, was fueled by radio and the selling of figures like Babe Ruth to the public as media personalities. (The sports hero is a creature closely related to the movie star.)
In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch synopsizes a generational shift in the nineteenth century shift wherein the bourgeoise society of yesteryear, “deeply antithetical to play,” were succeeded by a cohort that perceived in athletic competitions and the “strenuous life” a delivery mechanism for invaluable masculine virtues:
The new ideology of imperialism, both in England and in the United States, glorified the playing field as the source of qualities essential to national greatness and martial success. Far from cultivating sport as a form of display and splendid futility, the new national bourgeoisie—which at the end of the old century replaced the local elites of an earlier day—celebrated precisely their capacity to instill the “will to win.”
At a time when popular preachers of success were redefining the work ethic to stress the element of competition, athletic competition took on a new importance as a preparation for the battle of life. In a never-ending stream of books turned out to satisfy the rising demand for sports fiction, popular authors upheld Frank Merriwell [a character in books published between 1896 and 1949] and other athletes as models for American youth. The young man on the make, formerly advised to go into business at an early age and to master it from top to bottom, now learned the secret of success on the playing field, in fierce but friendly competition with his peers. Proponents of the new strenuousness insisted that athletics trained the courage and manliness that would promote not only individual success but upper-class ascendancy ... [Theodore] Roosevelt believed that sports would help to produce such leaders...
This perspective, says Lasch, went out of fashion when the United States’ imperial ambitions liberalized, American capitalism switched to a new track, and the mercenary character of professional sports intensified:
The prevalent mode of social interaction today is antagonistic cooperation (as David Riesman called it in The Lonely Crowd), in which a cult of teamwork conceals the struggle for survival within bureaucratic organizations. In sport, the rivalry among teams, now drained of its capacity to call up local or regional loyalties, reduces itself (like the rivalry among business corporations) to a struggle for shares of the market. The professional athlete does not care whether his team wins or loses (since losers share in the pot), as long as it stays in business.
I am reminded here of certain persons’ cynical remarks about the Democratic Party.
A friend of mine wrote a novel about a small-town amateur baseball league in early-1950s Nebraska. What they actually play is “fastpitch,” a somewhat obscure softball variant that was popular as an organized amateur (or even semi-professional) spectator sport during the 1930s and 1940s, but never had a national pro league. I’d never heard of it either. The MLB did a hell of a job at clearing the neighborhood and homogenizing the sport. Kids in the 1960s picking up a bat and ball wanted to play the game Mickey Mantle played.
There is a moment in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea where the elderly Cuban fisherman and a young boy of the village talk baseball:
“I’ll be back when I have the sardines. I’ll keep yours and mine together on ice and we can share them in the morning. When I come back you can tell me about the baseball.”
“The Yankees cannot lose.”
“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”
“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”
“I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland.”
“Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago.”
Later, as old Santiago tests his strength and his will against that of the great fish, he thinks of Joe DiMaggio (not for the first time):
He felt very tired now and he knew the night would come soon and he tried to think of other things. He thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit.
This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the hone spur in his heel.
Fictional though the narrative may be, the easy translation of professional athlete to folk hero when the game was at the height of its popularity in the United States (and its imperial orbit) is not in doubt. One may wonder: if Santiago lived a century earlier, what name, what image of what person would he call to mind to admonish and fortify himself? What if he lived a century later? In either case, would the heroic figure he invokes be a baseball player?
In 2040, the old fisherman’s totem may well be Batman, Goku, or Monkey D. Luffy. Their reality as “public figures” is similar to that of a living ballplayer whom one can only know about through the newspaper sports page and radio broadcasts—or that of a Catholic saint.
The beloved 1993 PG film The Sandlot mythologizes a group of boys informally getting together to play baseball in halcyon days of the early 1960s. The Sandlot, Field of Dreams, A League of Their Own, George Burns’ documentary miniseries Baseball, and other high-profile movies and television shows (or episodes, in the case of “Homer at the Bat”) perhaps represent a celebratory coda for baseball as an organic—or shall we call it “folkish?”— American cultural institution.
Sports journalist Joon Lee, writing for the New York Times in 2025, bemoans the state of spectator sports in an article bluntly titled: “It Costs $4,785 a Year to Be a Sports Fan Today.”
For most of the 20th century, pro sports were side hustles. Baseball clubs were run mostly by tavern owners, newspaper editors and civic boosters who usually lost money or broke even but saw teams as extensions of their communities. Then came television. In 1960, an early football league signed a contract with ABC and invented revenue sharing, which distributed a portion of the money generated by broadcasting games across all of a league’s teams. This model, which would rule the business for decades, gave leagues a path to financial stability while also supporting teams in smaller markets that would never otherwise have been able to compete with richer rivals in bigger metropolitan areas…
Throughout this time, sports leagues barred private equity investors and the like from team ownership for fear that short-term financial interests would override long-term team stability. When many sports migrated to cable, there were grumbles about losing free access. But cable also brought more games to American households while keeping the cost to viewers relatively modest. The revenue-sharing model was maintained.
The internet revolution brought a flood of new platforms hungry for live sports content. As streaming services competed for subscribers, they began throwing enormous sums at the leagues in their eagerness to lock in loyal audiences. At the same time, the leagues, particularly the N.B.A. and M.L.B., were looking to fund global expansion, following the playbook of the Premier League, England’s pro soccer organization: international TV deals, overseas tours, building global icons, all of which required more money. That money had to come from somewhere.
The leagues could have devised ways to pocket streamers’ cash while preserving their fandoms. Instead, they pursued the biggest immediate payouts by slicing up games and selling marquee matchups across platforms.
Executions have differed. The N.B.A. is getting $1.8 billion a year for the next 11 seasons from Amazon. M.L.B. stumbled, getting a comparatively measly $85 million per year from Apple TV+. The N.F.L. has been slower to move, as it continues to rake in tens of millions by airing its games on traditional broadcast networks. But as more fans move to streaming, it, too, is also starting to slowly carve up its schedule across an expanding slate of platforms.
What is true — particularly for basketball and baseball — is that this shift has been almost universally disastrous not only for fans but also for teams in smaller markets that relied on revenue-sharing models. As the old way of doing business fell away, the rich teams were getting richer while the rest were threatened with being left behind.
The new solution: private equity. In 2019, M.L.B. approved private equity minority ownership, and the N.B.A. soon followed. As an executive at a small-market Major League Baseball team texted me, desperate times call for lower standards.
Christopher Lasch again—this time on the obliteration of the proverbial “sacred sphere” in which sports and games are played:
In his recent study of sport, Michael Novak notes that television has lowered the quality of sports reporting, freeing the announcers from the need to describe the course of play and encouraging them instead to adopt the style of professional entertainers. The invasion of sport by the “entertainment ethic,” according to Novak, breaks down the boundaries between the ritual world of play and the sordid reality from which it is designed to provide escape. Broadcasters like Howard Cosell, who embody the “virulent passion for debunking in the land,” mistakenly import critical standards more appropriate to political reporting into the coverage of sports. Newspapers report the “business side” of sports on the sports page, instead of confining it to the business section where it belongs. “It is important,” Novak argues, “... to keep sports as insulated as we can from business, entertainment, politics, and even gossip...The preservation of parts of life not drawn up into politics and work is essential for the human spirit.” Especially when politics has become a “brutal, ugly business” and work (not sport) the opiate of the people, athletics alone, in Novak’s view, offer a glimpse of “the real thing.”
Professional sports belong the mélange of a general spectacle in which sports and politics and paid & amateur analysis is content is content is more content and it is simultaneously very urgent & serious and frivolous & make-believe but definitely all business—and to a social environment in which it appears to have become rather difficult to pick up a bat and ball, get some friends outside, and gather in the park to play a game for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon just for the hell of it.
The Financial Times, 2023—“Fears for Little League baseball in the US as children’s sport commercialises:”
For decades, “Little League” baseball has been a pillar of US Midwest culture: kids playing local kids, coached by a parent, at the town baseball diamond.
But now that idyll of Main Street life is being priced out of an increasingly lucrative US youth sports market, children’s sports experts say. Parents sometimes spend tens of thousands of dollars a year travelling around the country to see their kids coached by professionals, playing at state of the art facilities — hoping it will pay off one day in college scholarships, or even a professional sports career.
What used to be mostly a hyperlocal pursuit has become a $30bn-$40bn a year nationwide youth sports industry, Tom Farrey, executive director of Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, told me. “More money is flowing through youth sports than the NFL [National Football League] or any other professional league,” he says.
The sector is also attracting private equity investment. This year, PE titans and professional sports team owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer founded Unrivaled Sports, which says it expects to have 600,000 young athletes playing on its properties annually.
According to a 2022 survey from Aspen Institute’s Project Play, the average US family spends $883 a year on just one child’s primary sport. But spending isn’t equally spread: wealthy families spend four times as much as the lowest-income households.
Incidentally, a USA Today article from 2024 bears the headline: “Gen Z doesn’t care about sports. That’s part of a bigger problem.” That problem? Social isolation, says the [Zoomer] correspondent. It appears to be lost on him that the machinery that erected and sustains the NFL as the institution it is doesn’t manufacture much in the way of community spirit.
Nor does it occur to our New York Times guest correspondent, as he complains about the prohibitive costs and other difficulties of accessing and viewing professional sporting events, to wonder why the neighborhood never gets together to watch the guys/gals play baseball against the guys/gals of another neighborhood on Sunday afternoons in May and June.
2026 corroboration: “Are kids watching? The Super Bowl’s massive audience hides a ‘massive problem’”
The proposed solutions are well worth skimming, even though they’re what you might expect: Disney and Nickelodeon collaborations, fun interactive advertisements, novel ways of monetizing clipped NFL content on YouTube and TikTok, etc.
For a thirteen-year-old, it is far less onerous to play Fortnite than baseball. And if one plays Fortnite nightly and plays baseball never, they may be more interested in watching other people play Fortnite than watching other people play baseball.
I don’t want to imply a value judgement here. I sympathize.
A 2024 USA Today article: “70% of kids drop out of youth sports by age 13. Here’s why and how to fix it, per AAP.” The piece contains an item about preventing burnout—in schoolchildren playing ballgames. “For a lot of kids, it comes down to the fact that sports become less fun and more about the concept of what success is from more of an adult’s eyes than a child’s eyes,” says a pediatrician.
Without discounting the virtues of youth sports—physical exercise, socializing, character-building, etc.—it rather seems that having fun playing and competing in them is beside the point.
When I was young, I preferred to play Street Fighter II indoors than play “horse” in a neighbor kid’s driveway. I did both, but liked the video games better. Perhaps basketball had too much seriousness attached to it; I don’t remember having an especially good time playing in an elementary school varsity league. (Come to think of it, I believe I may have hated it.) But I naturally assumed the minority I belonged to—the “okay you win let’s go inside and play Mortal Kombat instead” set—would persist as a minority.
Esports’ traversal of the path from Point A (teenage boys standing side-by-side at a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, endeavoring to one-up each other through demonstrations of superior reflexes, wrist agility, and knowledge of the game’s hidden intricacies) to Point B (serious business) was completed in a much shorter time than the ballgames’ own progress from small-time fraternal competitions to an economic sector.
Baseball and its ilk were subsumed under a social and economic organ that was still taking shape while they grew popular as local diversions in parks, fields, and empty lots. Video games were already something endemic to the new ecosystem, and the route from a popular & unserious (though still played in earnest) amusement towards a lucrative subdivision of the entertainment industry with professional players, sponsorships, paid chatterboxes, official organizations, cross-promotions, etc., had already been charted. They were born fit to thrive in the social, commercial, and media landscape that emerged in the early twenty-first century. The situation in which they find themselves now may not have necessarily been expected forty years ago, but we can’t say there was any perversion of an original purpose or ethos in their journey to this point.
Unlike the members of baseball’s obsolesced amateur clubs, unpaid Mortal Kombat and Starcraft players never complained about professionalization—to the best of my knowledge.
Even in the event that Super Bowl and World Series viewership somehow plummets to a depth where the NFL and MLB are no longer capable of sustaining themselves financially, it is unlikely that any one esport, or esports in general, will replace them as America’s Pastime—not the least because the old broadcast monoliths and big newspapers (i.e., pre-algorithm media) were instrumental to securing the ballgames’ position in the public consciousness. As an aggregate, we’re seldom paying attention to the same thing at the same time to the degree that we could when television had three or four channels that were the same for everybody.
Vampire Savior is the de rigueur legacy game featured in this year’s Evo lineup, and a Lilith player took the grand prize at Evo Japan. You love to see it.
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