Politics & Power Quote by John Thorn

Sports fandom rarely starts with spreadsheets and championships; it starts with geography. Thorn, baseball’s most attentive historian, is pinpointing the quiet engine under all that noise: a game that doubles as a citizenship ritual and a tribal marker. His phrasing sets up a deliberate tension - “yes, Americans but nonetheless different” - that captures how national identity often works in practice. We like the big story of unity, but we live inside smaller stories of rivalry, accent, weather, and inherited grudges.

The intent is corrective. Thorn pushes back against the sentimental idea that fans are simply lovers of athletic excellence. He’s arguing that the “game” is also a cultural technology for sorting people into “us” and “them” without saying anything as blunt as politics. Local pride becomes an acceptable way to express difference: a clean, socially sanctioned arena where antagonism is thrilling rather than dangerous, where you can boo strangers and still feel civic.

The subtext is that fandom isn’t irrational; it’s useful. It gives residents of a town - especially in a country as sprawling and internally diverse as the U.S. - a shared vocabulary for belonging. Baseball’s historical context matters here: a sport marketed for over a century as national glue (“America’s pastime”) while simultaneously thriving on regional flavors, from ballpark quirks to city mythologies. Thorn is describing how one game manages that paradox: it sells Americanness as a baseline, then profits emotionally from our need to be distinct within it.