Tansits Week 10

Two very diverse readings from this week tie into our recent discussions with diversity in reporting amongst black and white media. As we have discussed in class, throughout the early 20^th century, the black media served to cover and embellish only black sporting events while the white media covered only white players in white sports. But as we read in Brian Carroll’s A Perfect Baseball Day, changes were coming by the middle of the 1900s.

The East-West Classic began in 1933, and grew into a cultural institution for the black society. Chicago’s Comiskey Park was the site for thousands to turn out to see the Negro League’s finest players on black baseball’s largest stage. But Carroll’s piece doesn’t simply highlight the significance of the East-West game. Carroll explains that through this game both owners and black newspapers (specifically the Pittsburgh Courier) used the East-West game to grow baseball culturally and economically so that by the early 1940s, the game was out earning much of white professional baseball.  This East-West Classic brought African-Americans from all over the nation to Chicago, a central meeting place where it was a culmination of sport and culture. Thousands of black baseball fans matriculated to the city, planning their vacations around the event. This All-Star game essentially became the event to see in the early 1940s baseball community. But as greed began taking over owners, the press pushed on towards the importance of the East-West Classic and of integration in baseball. Carroll wrote that the game was more than about baseball it was the heart and soul of the black sporting community. And once integration did arrive, the press gradually moved further and further from covering the Negro Leagues and eventually even the East-West Classic, which was last played in 1954. It was a bittersweet ending, with integration on the rise but an end to one of the crown jewels of black culture.

The second reading for this week covers fantasy football and how it relates to television ratings and viewership. It seems simple enough to understand that the more fans involved in fantasy football, the more likely they are to watch more games to see their players on their teams. But the research done in John Fortunato’s paper doesn’t show a very strong relationship between the two. He writes that although there has been shown to be a statistically significant relationship between the two; it’s no where near being a dominant factor in networks deciding which games to play on prime time. Nonetheless his writing does indicate the there is a role that fantasy football plays in television viewership, enough so that networks should take a look at.