The Baseball Extra

The greatest difference between baseball and sports such as football, hockey, or basketball is not to be found in the game itself, on the field so to speak, but rather in the stands, in the unique disposition and status of the baseball audience. The fans at other sports remain spectators.  At a ballgame, however, they become extras.  How does this transpire?

I've always been struck at how fans at ballgames let their attention roam. The game doesn't seem to preoccupy anyone, and much of the time is spent looking at the park, at the other fans, and at the immobile majesty of the players located furthest from the action. Where fans at a football game rivet their attention to the pigskin with the same rabid intensity as stock investors watching the market index, spectators at a ball game seem strangely bereft of focus. Having arrived at the enormous stadium, it is as if each fan began to actively wonder what happened to his television set that so ably mediated the game for him in his living room. Images of baseball stands crammed with people are fascinating because they provide a glimpse into a photographic paradox: a particular collective whose individuals are nevertheless not yoked to the same moment. They do not share the unified concentration we see in people gathered for graduation or wedding pictures: each fan remains occupied with a separate inner plane, hooked by a idiosyncratic point of focus, adrift in a temporality different from the one secured by the photograph. This picture from the bleachers, circa 1975, perfectly renders the way Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, invites skewed perspectives:

The unfixed presence of the baseball spectator became apparent this past summer when a media backlash arose over a particular fan behind home plate at a Royals game. Still frames from the baseball telecast were cropped and enlarged to highlight this background figure:

Many bloggers said that this was the ultimate commentary on the 0 and 9 stretch with which the Royals began their season. The Kansas City Chiefs football team has had similar dry patches, yet why is it impossible to imagine someone avidly reading Steve Baldacci's Zero Day at Arrowhead Stadium? It's because only baseball permits a relative autonomy to its fans.One can attend a game merely to tend to one's hobby. The spectators at a football game delight only in subjecting themselves to the movement of the ball. Their subordination to the celebrity of the ball indicates how football sustains a different sort of spectatorial politics. Strict focus on the pigskin is all one can do in the football stands: the more you are deprived
of action or intervention in the sport, the less you have to do while watching the game.

Baseball, by contrast, has always thrived on the potential of each fan gathering the spotlight to him- or her-self. Even the man reading behind home plate seems to be awaiting some moment when he might become involved in the game. Steve Bartman is one of the most infamous baseball spectators ever. During the playoffs during the 2003 season, Bartman successfully moved from being a mere extra to something closer to a 10th player. Perched in the first row of the stands along the left field line and wearing headphones, Bartman lunged for a fly ball and in the process prevented Cubs outfielder Moises Alou from getting the team out of the inning (and possibly to the World Series):

As extra, the baseball fan treads that line between obscurity and potential celebrity. He occupies the Zero Day of spectatorship. Bartman later would "star" in a film, titled Catching Hell, about his role in prolonging the curse of failure overhanging the Chicago Cubs. Quite symbolically, Bartman refused to have any part in this film in which he is the main subject.

Because the baseball can catapult the spectator into a suddenly individuated (and scapegoated) extra, it is an object of both dread and desire, a souvenir that can knock out your teeth. This photo of a homerun landing in the Green Monster Seats at Fenway Park encapsulates the curious valence of the baseball:

Once it enters the seats, the ball precipitates a set of classical gestures we might more readily find in a Caravaggio painting. The above photo is layed out like a Last Supper reenactment dispersed across three tiers. The fans extend in shock away from the center seat at the table, occupied by the baseball which has just declared that one of the the fans will betray it three times before the cock crows. The faces of the fans are no less aghast than Peter's. Some seem to dismiss the ball as a hoax. One man in the lower right waves his hand to stop this nonsense. Another, in a blue hat and shirt, begins to hector his two young children for abandoning such a valuable souvenir. Nobody knows whether to run toward or run away from the ball. In this undirected and unsupervised moment, the ball fan grasps what it must feel like when the actor moves across one's space.