"It's tempting, because as one senator said to me, 'We know if we invite baseball down, we'll draw a crowd'"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t always need a speech; sometimes it just needs a promotion schedule. Fay Vincent’s line is a small, almost tossed-off admission of how public life gets staged: not by persuasion, but by programming. The “tempting” is doing a lot of work here. It signals a moral and institutional pressure point: once you realize you can summon people with spectacle, it becomes hard not to use it.
The senator’s quote is the tell. “Invite baseball down” treats the national pastime like a touring act you can book to juice attendance, launder legitimacy, or create the flattering optics of unity. Baseball isn’t framed as culture or community; it’s logistics. A crowd is the commodity, and the crowd is proof - of relevance, of popularity, of success - even if the underlying substance is thin.
Vincent, a lawyer and former MLB commissioner, would have lived at the intersection of sport as civic ritual and sport as leverage. His era saw baseball increasingly enlisted for politics: ceremonial first pitches, stadium subsidies, patriotic pageantry, strike-era narratives about greed and loyalty. The line captures a late-20th-century reality that’s only intensified since: institutions that struggle to earn attention learn to borrow it from entertainment.
The subtext is slightly bleak, but not melodramatic. It’s an inside joke with sharp edges: lawmakers know the difference between democratic engagement and a good turnout, and they’re willing to confuse the two if it makes the room look full. Baseball becomes a prop in the theater of governance - and everyone involved understands the bargain.
The senator’s quote is the tell. “Invite baseball down” treats the national pastime like a touring act you can book to juice attendance, launder legitimacy, or create the flattering optics of unity. Baseball isn’t framed as culture or community; it’s logistics. A crowd is the commodity, and the crowd is proof - of relevance, of popularity, of success - even if the underlying substance is thin.
Vincent, a lawyer and former MLB commissioner, would have lived at the intersection of sport as civic ritual and sport as leverage. His era saw baseball increasingly enlisted for politics: ceremonial first pitches, stadium subsidies, patriotic pageantry, strike-era narratives about greed and loyalty. The line captures a late-20th-century reality that’s only intensified since: institutions that struggle to earn attention learn to borrow it from entertainment.
The subtext is slightly bleak, but not melodramatic. It’s an inside joke with sharp edges: lawmakers know the difference between democratic engagement and a good turnout, and they’re willing to confuse the two if it makes the room look full. Baseball becomes a prop in the theater of governance - and everyone involved understands the bargain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sports |
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