Rust Belt Pastime, Sun Belt Game (Sun Belt #6)
Still reflecting on the southernization of America.
It’s fascinating how baseball continues to show its age, not just in its rules or pace, but in the geography of its franchises.
The sport still carries the scent of concrete and steel when you trace how slowly it crept southward. The Braves didn’t move to Atlanta from Milwaukee until 1966, just two years before the first Super Bowl. Texas had no team until the 1970s, and Florida didn’t join the majors until the 1990s. Baseball is the great urban-industrial pastime: teams wedged into cities where factories hummed, rail hubs converged, and tightly packed immigrant neighborhoods produced both players and packed grandstands. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago are all cities where hard hats were as common as scorecards, and a professional ballpark was never more than a trolley ride from a smokestack.
Football, by contrast, sprinted into the Sun Belt. Its map reads like a census growth chart, with franchises popping up in Phoenix, Charlotte, Nashville, Dallas, and Tampa. Football is the sport of modern America, and baseball has been playing catch-up ever since.
Football bloomed in the post–World War II boom, just as industry hollowed out and the federal highway system knit the Sun Belt to the suburbs. Air conditioning sealed the deal, luring millions south with the promise of year-round comfort. Snow shovels gave way to golf carts; heavy coats to convertible tops.
It was also the first sport truly made for television with short bursts of action, built-in pauses for an endless parade of ads, and Sunday as a ritualized broadcast where church pews give way to couch cushions. Baseball’s long, daily drama was harder to shoehorn into the commuter culture that defined postwar life. And with college football already a southern religion, the NFL found fertile ground.
Oddly, the South is also a stronghold for college baseball. But Major League Baseball’s ownership culture is far more territorial than the NFL’s. You’d think college baseball would be a natural farm-to-majors pipeline, but owners guard their TV markets like family heirlooms. The NFL thrives on national television deals but the MLB depends on local contracts. That leaves Sun Belt markets outside Texas and Florida struggling to compete with New York, Boston, or Chicago.
There’s also the matter of loyalty. In much of the South, baseball allegiance is already locked in, not to a pro team, but to a college. Why trade a fierce in-state rivalry for a 162-game season played at a slower clip, without the built-in tribalism? Minor league teams already fill the local niche with cheaper tickets and quirkier charms. And by the time July 4th cookouts and beach weekends roll around, a casual fan’s attention has drifted.
The U.S.A.’s oldest surviving baseball park is in Birmingham, Alabama and was home to the Negro League and Minor League games. It was opened in 1910. Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The southernization of America isn’t just political. It’s stitched into the business of its pastimes. Once air conditioning became standard, the question stopped being why anyone would move south. The real question became: if you could bask in the sun year-round, why wouldn’t you?
As baseball’s map mirrors that of an older America, football’s looks like moving trucks, fresh pavement, and budding skylines in once-sleepy backwaters. The story is one of a country that used to live under factory dust and gradually moved into suburban sunrooms. A nation that traded in long summer innings and porchside intrigue for Sunday dopamine rushes and advertisement-addled frenzy. For better or worse, the future is running no-huddle offense under the southern sun.
Check out others in my Sun Belt series here:
Tortillas and the U.S./Mexico Border (Sunbelt #5)
The discussion of the U.S./Mexico border is often perverse and strategic. This convers…
Chicken Sandwiches for the Soul (Sunbelt #4)
August 2009, Chick-fil-A headquarters in College Park. Wikimedia Commons.
Electric Churches and Dogs Catching Cars (Sunbelt #3)
ROCKLIN, CA, U.S.A. - OCT. 13, 2021: The main entrance to Destiny Christian Church. The controversial church offers vaccine exemptions, and has been accused of violating IRS non-profit rules. In America, many argue that megachurches like this have become more business and politics than faith and worship.
The Desert City (Sunbelt #2)
Phoenix Arizona Panoramic Photo. Sunset in the City. United States of America. Courtesy of Shutterstock.
America’s Frontiers (Sunbelt #1)
Sedona: new housing at Courthouse Butte and Bell Rock. Courtesy of Shutterstock. Courtesy of Shutterstock.
I do not get professional sports. Leagues are corporations and as such their sole reason for existence is to make a profit for Shareholders, teams are franchises (read plantations) owned by wealthy planters, who use and abuse their slaves., or rather indentured servants. Teams move from town to town, state to state, players come from all over the world, hardly any players on a team were born in the city or state they play for.
It is like watching Microsoft and Intel fight it out for market dominance.
Bu this I do know, humans are tribal and they fear being alone, so they need to find something with which they can identify. A religion, a corporation, an occupation, a religion, a sports team and it is all of the above. We don't have one identity, we have many, and when that identity is under threat or attacked we feel that we are under attack.
Back in the 1970's, the EU commissioned a study to find the cause of the soccer (football) riots, that plagued Europe.
What they discovered is that when a team lost, the testosterone levels of the fans plummeted, and the riots were simply a means of regaining lost testosterone. Riots were always imitated by the fans of the losing team.
In the south, football is indeed a religion. I lived for 9 months in a small town in NE Louisiana.
Segregated schools.
The black community had there on H.S., Abraham Lincoln High, so named, and the whole town was super proud of the team, showered it with the best equipment and support that they could have, they consistently won All State. and the school itself was new, the white high school was a four story brick affair in a state of disrepair (it is no a senior citizen home), eventually, two years after building Abe Lincoln high, they built a new high school for the white kids.
I had moved from Philadelphia to this town, to live with my grandparents, after being kicked out of high school for being a juvenile delinquent, and fell in with some wild ass cajuns.
I won't go into all of the bad crap they did, which eventually motivated me to join the service, but they traveled to football games, not to see the game, but to get in fights behind the bleachers.
Anyway the depth of football religiosity in that town, and I believe in the south,, overcame their racism.