America’s Favorite Pastime

As an avid baseball fan who wasn’t born in the 19th century, for a long time I thought the game’s tagline of “America’s favorite pastime” was at best, corny, and at worst, out of touch with what American culture has become. The more I thought about it, and the more kinds of sports I watched, the more I began to see the ways in which we find our values, fears, desires, and priorities (for better or for worse) reflected back at us from the pitch. From baseball to Australian Rules Footie, fans have been interweaving sports and identity for as long as games and teams have existed. This new monthly series will spend time parsing out ways we see ourselves—as Americans, and as humans—in our sports, and what that might say about us.

Population of Philadelphia: 1,580,863; Median household income: $40,649; Price of entry to see the Liberty Bell: $0; Average travel time to work: 32.9 minutes; NFL Championships: one; Active Pro-Bowl Quarterbacks: two; 2018 Eagles record: 9-7-0; Number of bald eagles at the Philadelphia Zoo: two

Before last year, I never paid much attention to football.

The violence of the sport, the brute force of it, is certainly a feat of athleticism and no doubt a draw for many. But for me, it’s hard to stay invested without a through-line. After all, violence on its face is not a story, and the fits-and-starts momentum of the game—the play setups, the endless penalties—only exacerbated this problem. So while I’d watch a game in passing, and could be drawn in if others around me were invested, eventually I’d get bored.

Then, in 2017 after eight years in New York City, I moved to Philadelphia. It was one of the places I’d called home before, but it was the first time I’d lived there by choice. And it had changed. It wasn’t unrecognizable, not overrun by an ice blue wall of Chases or Citibanks, or Walgreens playing at being your friendly local pharmacy. But there was something in the air, heady—and it wasn’t just our garbage. It was, I think, a feeling of hope.

Meanwhile and perhaps not unrelatedly, the Eagles, led by surprise superstar quarterback Carson Wentz, were winning. Winning was a thing the Eagles never did, though this has never stopped Eagles fans from an extremely aggressive devotion to their team. Wentz had an unusual origin story—he played college ball at North Dakota State, a team only recently turned Division I, and a far cry from the likes of the Big 10 and Pack 12 NFL feeder schools.

Maybe, Philadelphians began to think, ...