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.

Number of players that have been on, or are currently on the Injured List (IL) in 2019: 287; Number of disabled Americans as per last census: 56.7 million, or 19% of the population; Daniel Murphy’s 2019 slash line: .171/.244/.329; Number of muscles in the human buttocks: 3

I am used to people talking wide arcs around my deafness. They look embarrassed when it comes up and they somehow have to refer to the fact that I can’t hear. I watch them rifle mentally through a variety of deeply weird terms invented by hearing people—“hearing handicapped,” “impaired,” or, my personal favorite, “challenged” (challenge accepted?)—trying to avoid saying the word “deaf.” Sometimes they don’t say anything at all, just blush and kind of wave or point at their own ear apologetically. Most of the time I find this dance funny, but sometimes it is frustrating. Deaf, I end up explaining, is not that kind of four-letter word, and the most accurate descriptor for my deaf-ass ears.

Mine is hardly a unique experience—deaf and disabled people have these conversations daily. This season an iteration of the discussion has even been spotlighted in sports when Major League Baseball announced they were changing the name of the Disabled List, known colloquially as “the DL,” to the Injured List (IL). The operating procedures for said list remain the same: major league teams have an active roster of twenty-five players, and if someone is injured they are relegated to an inactive list for a period of either ten, fifteen, or sixty days, to make space for another player to be called up from the extended forty-man roster or the minor leagues.

The change, semantically, makes sense. I don’t think anyone would argue that Daniel Murphy’s tight butt muscle, or Miguel Cabrera’s “flu-like symptoms” (read: hangover) are actual disabilities. However, in a game famous for its...