In Search of Baseball and National Identity, from Bangkok to Boston and Back
An American’s first-ever baseball game gives clues to the heart of a country she left behind years ago.
BOSTON, Mass.
The aisles of the A&P supermarket in my American hometown displayed boxes of Cracker Jack — candied peanuts and popcorn — right at kindergartner eye-level. It was hard to miss the drawing of the cute sailor boy and the emblem that teased, “Prize Inside!” On most grocery trips with my grandmother, I asked for a box of Cracker Jack — an old-fashioned American treat from a time before airplanes flew.
But I wasn’t looking so much to satiate hunger. Mostly, I sought a connection with a song my grandmother would often sing to me:
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don’t care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
At the old ball game.
Grandmothers never say no, so I never left the A&P without a box of Cracker Jack. The dusty smell of paper and burnt sugar would catch in our noses and cling to our fingers as we shared the contents. On the walk back to my grandmother’s house, I’d hum the song I’d heard so many times, contemplating what it was like at these mysterious ball games.
What, I wondered, could possibly be so good that you didn’t care if you never got back home again?
Home, as it happens, is where most of my childhood unfolded. My family did not travel much. There were no camping trips, no summers in Europe, no spring breaks at Disney. We didn’t go anywhere, not to each other’s houses for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not for football, not for baseball. I may have grown up in America, but my upbringing took place in a vacuum.
In my early twenties I moved overseas, leaving a flabbergasted family in my wake. I’d made a conscious decision to uncouple from my home country, but my cultural disconnect existed long before I booked a one-way international flight. As I embarked on an expat lifestyle with a European husband, I promised myself I would keep my American passport yet be a citizen of the world. It wouldn’t be too hard, I thought, to detach from a culture and place with which I’d never felt enmeshed. And if I failed, I still had that blue passport to carry me home again.
I enjoyed living abroad, but my rootlessness began to bother me. Weak cultural underpinnings and a life of constant moving left me lacking a national identity. Because of this, I struggled to understand myself and to pass down my culture to my two little girls. I wondered: While living in Thailand, could I piece together a sense of Americanness? What steps could I take to help me feel closer to the place I’d left?
A close friend of mine in Bangkok, who’d recently returned to Thailand after watching baseball in his hometown of Pittsburgh, discovered I’d lived almost half a lifetime without seeing his favorite sport. As I planned my trip home to Boston this summer, he made me promise that I would see a game during my visit. Maybe cracking the baseball code would give me insight into my homeland. Maybe I could learn, as an adult, a few things about my countrymen by experiencing their — our — age-old pastime.
It all seemed to fit: Baseball, my good friend told me, is “the distillation of what Americans want America to be: a game born of cities and open fields, a game that takes you on a trip but carries you home again.”
The Boston sky was a searing cerulean on the evening I ventured out to Fenway Park to watch the Boston Red Sox take on the New York Yankees — baseball’s most famous rivals.
I am doing this, I thought. There I was, after more than three decades as an American on this planet, finally taking myself out to a ballgame.
Men with thick Bostonian accents scalped tickets on the corner. “Getcha tickets, here, folks!” Others sold memorabilia: pins, T-shirts, stickers, caps — when it comes to labeling yourself a fan, many things are possible. Everyone was bedecked in baseball clothing, a school of Sox-hued fish moving in a red-white-and-blue stream. But I was, after all, an outsider. I stopped to ask for directions.
“Just follow the crowd. Everyone’s goin’ to the game,” replied an amused townie.
After almost a decade abroad, it was clear that I was a tourist in my home country. I would need to learn through observation. Like a newcomer.
There are 30 major-league baseball parks in America, and each is a unique sliver of the city it represents. Like airline hubs or a central train station, ballparks are connection points. Teams and fans travel to them. Across America, sea to shining sea, these parks are where families, couples and friends congregate.
For a first-ever American baseball experience, there are few places better than Boston. Few American cities are richer with history. This town vibrates with the soul of America’s societal beginnings and the war of revolution that created the United States. Boston is rich in baseball history, too: Fenway Park, adored and epic, is the country’s oldest active major-league baseball stadium.
Through thick and thin, on battlefields and infields, Bostonians have always rooted for the home team. Now it was my turn.
Just outside the stands on Yawkee Way, a band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” an old American Civil War song. A man on stilts played catch with kids in the crowd. Everyone — the young, the old, the in-between — smiled, talked, and laughed.
Food stalls — housed in an underground, concrete ring around the stadium — emanated a celebratory, salty-sweet aroma that seemed to fuel the crowd’s anticipatory joy. Fenway guys and gals served up hot dogs, pizza, onion rings. Kids held poofs of cotton candy larger than their heads, and adults juggled pretzels with cups of Budweiser. And though there were plenty of popcorn and peanuts, I spied not a single box of Cracker Jack.
This was the classic American snapshot of spending and consuming. Yet I sensed something larger in these pregame festivities. These were people who came to root, root, root for the home team, each in her or his own way. To these Bostonians, in their outfits, with their paraphernalia and their ballpark food, this was one way of finding home. All it took was the price of a ticket. Could it be that easy? What could I learn here?
It was possible that the Red Sox would lose on this night. The Yankees are notoriously tough to beat.
But while the game itself mattered, it also, in a way, didn’t. Fans ate, drank, and shopped with gusto. They sported team colors as though winning were a certainty. I realized that this enduring hope for victory — expectation, even — underscores two truly American ideals I’ve seen from my expatriate perch so far away: loyalty and optimism. Pocketing these cultural souvenirs, I headed to my seat for the game, fingers crossed.
Even those who don’t know the sport have a good idea what a baseball field looks like. The infield is a dusty brown diamond marked by four bases, and a wide expanse of rich green grass makes up the outfield. Major-league baseball stadiums typically seat 30,000 to 50,000, so these patches of brown and green are enormous, and the field, at first glance, can be breathtaking in its scope.
The green grass of the outfield and the brown dirt of the infield conjure images of the American heartland, the middle stretch of the nation that no ocean touches. The countryside is where Americans like to believe that crops and wholesome values grow together, where they (or maybe I mean “we”) see the birthplace of values like hard work, perseverance, honesty and humility. Maybe that’s why, when you step onto the bleachers with Converse sneakers covered in city grime, it’s easy to feel that you’ve leapt back to something classic and familiar.
I sat down at my designated little red seat in a state of semi-awe. I did a panoramic sweep of the stands and it occurred to me: Never in my life had I been with so many of my fellow Americans at the same time. The sun began to dip, casting a mellow haze over the park. And then it was time to “play ball.”
I was confused at first. I didn’t understand the game, really. I didn’t grow up playing baseball, or watching it. As the game progressed through its early innings and I sipped my Coke, I began to gauge my reactions from the crowd around me. To figure out what was going on, I had to look at the faces of the people around me. My fellow Americans.
They spoke of balls and strikes, of players traded from one team to another, of hits just barely foul — jargon I never really understood but was beginning to. I was totally dependent on what I heard from the people around me. All I saw was a white ball soar into the sky now and then, looking like a tiny grain of jasmine rice.
By the middle of the game, I had developed a rhythm. When people got excited, I got excited, too. When they clapped, I clapped. When they stood up, I stood up, too. I was joining in, trying to feel as connected as I could though I had no idea what I was doing.
As the game reached its final third and the Yankees took the lead, I noticed an enduring sense among those around me that if the Red Sox loaded the bases, they’d have a chance. There was possibility. Hope. The people around me — all on their feet now — still believed. They were all standing. Though I was alone, I felt united with them in our hope for victory. But I was still very aware of the empty seat to the right of me. I belonged. Kind of.
During the “seventh-inning stretch,” an American baseball tradition, the entire ballpark stood to hear “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the song I learned from my grandma. My throat tightened as I sang alongside thousands of Americans I’d never met: I don’t care if I never get back.
Did I care?
A few days later, I was in a taxi going to Logan airport for my flight back to Bangkok. The taxi driver chatted me up.
“Where you visiting from?”
“Thailand,” I responded.
“Oh, wow. Thailand. Where you from originally?”
“Cape Cod,” I said.
“Ah, yeah. I can tell. You sound like you’re from here. Don’t you miss it?”
“Sort of.” I felt tentative.
“Well,” he mused, “home is wherever you like.”
As I boarded the plane that would point me back toward Bangkok, I recognized that my definition of all this had been a bit too narrow. Perhaps my cabbie had been right: Home is wherever you like — if you’re lucky.
And if home, in a more abstract sense, is where the heart is, then I’d like to think that we leave pieces of our hearts in each and every one of the places that mean something to us. Maybe hearts are scattered across cities and fields, infields and outfields around the world; maybe yours is, too.
My first baseball game took me home and on a trip — a trip into my own country’s culture. It reminded me of American values like loyalty, optimism and sense of place, all of which I could use to help build up my national identity and share with my children. And though the Sox lost that day, I am sure that I left a piece of my heart at Fenway Park, right there on my little red seat, with a note that says, “I’ll come back here one day. But now I’m going home.”
Shannon Frandsen, a writer, photographer and the editor-in-chief of Wanderlust Magazine in Thailand, grew up in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She lives in Bangkok with her husband and two daughters.
