As baseball starts, why do we let costs spark division? | Opinion

Ballpark concessions pioneer Harry M. Stevens once described New York City’s Polo Grounds, former home of three of the city’s Major League Baseball teams, as a place where “you would find a prominent banker eating a frankfurter and drinking a glass of beer, and beside him would be a truck driver doing precisely the same thing. ” Anyone attending Opening Day this year at Yankee Stadium or Citi Field, however, will be unlikely to find fans of similar wealth and income disparities interacting.

While contemporary ballparks clearly belie historical understandings of ballparks as sites of egalitarian intermixing , even those historical understandings are flawed. Ballparks were never accessible to all, yet the rhetoric calling them so was both powerful and reified the notion that the people who were regularly in the ballpark — middle- and upper-class white men — were the core of American society. From the game’s professional origins, teams charged different prices in different parts of the ballpark.

Moreover, when Sunday baseball was illegal and all games were day games — as was the case in New York until 1919 and in other northeastern cities into the 1930s — few working-class fans could go to the park because nearly all games took place during their regular working hours. Rarely if ever were women described as true fans and the methods owners employed to attract them were often demeaning . As white flight and suburbanization changed the demographics of cities after World War II, the neighborhoods around a number of ballparks become poorer and less white .

Many of the middle- and upper-class white fans who frequented baseball games no longer lived near ballparks; instead, they lived in places like Westchester, Long Island, and northern New Jersey where they relied on automobiles for transportation. At the same time, overt racism and classism were increasingly socially unacceptable, so teams made fans feel comfortable by allowing them drive to games and park in well-lit parking lots , rather than explicitly bar anyone. The postwar generation of stadiums had more tiers, which added new financial barriers to full access to the fan experience, and were more difficult for working-class fans and fans of color to access than their predecessors because they were often poorly served by mass transportation.