✪ Fenway Park, College Basketball And The Loss Of Community

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he quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity. Without these, no amount of mere material wealth will serve to arrest the developing sense of alienation in our society, and the mounting preoccupation with the imperatives of community.

—Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 1953.

Two weeks ago, the Boston Red Sox posted a video in anticipation of Major League Baseball’s opening day. The video; which the team captioned “Tomorrow,” was a collection of clips from previous opening days at Boston’s Fenway Park; notably, from the 1950s. It was powerful. It was nostalgic. And, as it turns out, it was extremely provocative.

Although it’s highly unlikely that this was the organization’s intention, the Red Sox video sparked a massive online conversation about what’s been “lost” in American society over the past several decades. On X, posters lamented that “Boston used to be such an amazing city; now it’s a dump” and that the video showed “a beautiful city and crowd. This world no longer exists; it was willfully destroyed,” and that “Mayor Michelle Wuhan and the Radical Left have done everything in their power to erase this version of the Once Beautiful City of Boston.”

Inevitably, given the current political tensions, some commenters turned their ire on politicians of the near and distant past, blaming the destruction of this former version of America on mass immigration and related policy decisions and failures: “Then in 1965. Democrats said you know what this country needs . . . 1 million Third World foreigners and their entire chain migration families to be made citizens every year!!!”

I empathize with the commenters’ frustration and their wistful melancholy. Indeed, I wholeheartedly share much of their sense of loss. The society shown in the video of opening day at Fenway Park truly no longer exists. And while it is irrefutable that much about society has improved over the last 70-plus years, the specific characteristics of the prior generation identified in the video are worth lamenting; the apparent calm, dignity, and solidity of the crowd that showed up to celebrate together and cheer on “their” team.

At the same time, I also think the online commenters misunderstand the nature of the issues that precipitated the loss that they feel. Something has been lost, but it’s bigger and weightier than just “the way things used to be.” What the commenters miss is the broader social, cultural, and legal evolution that produced the loss and the near inevitability that their anger, disappointment, and feelings of alienation will only grow worse and more profound over the next several years—and probably longer.

What we see in the video; and what makes it so appealing and comforting, is somewhat difficult to pinpoint. It isn’t better-governed or better-run cities. It isn’t greater wealth or more apparent affluence, or even that people were better dressed. And it certainly isn’t greater racial or cultural homogeneity. Many of those things appear in the video and, clearly, were interpreted by some as the source of their nostalgia, but they are merely coincidental. In truth, the source of grief stimulated by scenes of “the America that once was” is the loss of community.

As the late, great Robert Nisbet suggested in the passage at the top of this column, the need for community is deeply embedded in man’s character. It is something that we absolutely require, that we crave, that enables us to live in tranquility and contentment. It is a big part of what distinguishes us from the rest of God’s creation. Nisbet noted further that “community” is something larger, something different from mere geographical proximity. It “encompasses all forms of relationships that are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.” In short, community provides stability, consistency, and predictability. It enables man to build a life and to know, with reasonable certainty, that the things that are important today will also be important tomorrow.

Given this, the sense of loss triggered by the Fenway Park video isn’t about the collapse of Boston into a troubled, crime-ridden city—or at least it’s not just about that. Rather, it’s also about the collapse of the Red Sox and the collapse of baseball teams as a source of social cohesion and especially “continuity in time.” Recall that in the 1950s, when the scenes in the video were filmed, baseball’s “reserve clause” was still in effect, which meant that the Red Sox (and all other major league clubs) owned the rights to the players they signed in perpetuity. Thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s 1922 ruling in the case of Federal Baseball Club v. National League, baseball was ruled exempt from antitrust claims under the Sherman Act. It was considered an “amusement,” not interstate commerce, thereby giving it protected status. In other words, the Red Sox were legally and officially Boston’s team in more than name only. The players were, almost by definition, part of the city and part of its culture (as the Yankee players were of the Bronx, the Indians of Cleveland, and so on). Communities like Brooklyn, which lost the Dodgers to Los Angeles, suffered enormously when their baseball teams left, prompting children and even adults to write, speak, and mourn this “tragedy” for decades.

In 1970, Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause in court. Although he eventually lost his case, he nevertheless exposed the exploitation enabled by the clause and set the stage for its eventual removal. That removal came five years later, when arbitrator Peter Seitz effectively overruled the clause, leading to the negotiations that produced the free agent system.

Major League Baseball, as it existed prior to 1975, was inarguably exploitative. Owners had all the power, and those who provided the “amusement” had almost none. Players needed to have some agency in the decisions that determined their careers and their salaries. And while the free agent system gave them that agency and ended much of the exploitation, it also destroyed the community surrounding baseball teams. In blunt terms, free agency turned baseball teams into “franchises” and made baseball a business rather than a source of communal coherence. After all, it is impossible to develop “continuity in time” when free agency enables players to join and leave teams as often as they and their agents deem feasible.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. One might argue, in fact, that the story is in the process of reaching its gruesome and community-destroying apogee right now. The only thing in sports that has, historically, been more consistent and more community-fostering than pre-free agency baseball is college athletics. Whereas baseball helped provide cities with identities and built larger connections around them, college teams built “families” that spanned the country and even defined the personalities of states. One could, for example, hardly imagine a more united and committed community than the state of Nebraska in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, at the height of the University of Nebraska’s football dominance. Sayings like “once a Jayhawk, always a Jayhawk” explained the loyalty of Kansans to their basketball players and former KU players to their university. When the great Dean Smith retired after building the North Carolina basketball legend, the program suffered some lean years before rebuilding under Roy Williams because the university insisted on hiring from “within the family.” In many ways, college athletics filled the “community” void left when professional sports became too aggressively business-like.

However, now that too is ending. The speed and chaos that characterized the transformation of college sports have made the sense of loss more obvious, more powerful, and less deniable. Baseball’s free agency arrived gradually and was partially absorbed over decades. The NCAA’s NIL/transfer portal revolution happened almost overnight, producing a kind of before-and-after clarity that makes the loss of community more real and more serious. College sports derive their meaning almost entirely from place and tradition; the rivalry, the fight song, and the decades of shared history between a fan base and a program. All of that is over now, however, and as rosters turn over nearly entirely every year via the portal, the thing being sold as “Michigan football” or “Kansas basketball” becomes increasingly fictional as a community.

The loss here is only beginning to be felt. In five years, ten years, or a quarter of a century, the loss will be more apparent and will be more devastating. President Trump recently signed an executive order intended to halt this disastrous loss of community, but it’s highly dubious that he has any authority here, and things are unlikely to change much in any case.

As it is, the blame here mostly lies with the institutions that exploited players for so long—MLB and the NCAA. If their leaders had had any foresight, they would have handled things differently and could have preserved their respective communities. Now, it’s too late. In 50, 60, or 70 years, our kids and grandkids will watch videos of what it was like to camp out before games at Cameron Indoor Arena or Allen Fieldhouse, and they’ll lament that this world, too, no longer exists.✪