A design lesson from Major League Baseball

Not long ago, baseball needed to be saved from itself.

By 1900, the 55-year-old sport had become a brawling, corrupt, dangerous mess. It was beset by alcohol-fueled violence — there were as many fights in the stands as there were on the fields. Gambling, public profanity, declining attendance, rogue umpires, player contract disputes, and warring team owners made the entire project feel doomed. The National League, baseball’s sole professional league at the time, was collapsing under the weight of its own unbridled testosterone.

Enter Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson.

The former sportswriter had long lobbied for a more civilized version of the sport, and in 1901, he did something about it: he created the American League and set out to make it a family-friendly version of the now rowdy game.

His theory was simple. If you can make baseball a place where women feel safe, the sport will thrive.

You’ll see where I’m going with this in a minute, but stick with me here.

Johnson began by banning liquor from all major league parks, removed violent players, and professionalized the umpiring staff. He then woo’d away like-minded players, giving them a competitive salary and better playing conditions in new markets.

It worked!

Now, I’m truncating a lot of interesting and complex history here, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see the unexpected benefits of Johnson’s redesign efforts.

Before the move to family-friendly games, baseball’s primary sponsors were liquor and tobacco brands. (Clearly bail bondsmen missed the memo.)

Coca-Cola entered the arena around 1909, and household goods came into the picture in a serious way in the 1920s and ’30s, wrangling stars like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth as spokesplayers. Wheaties expanded the field, with billboards and sponsored game radio broadcasts, which targeted women and kids listening at home. By the early 1940s, General Mills was one of the main sponsors of baseball, hiring popular athlete Helen Dettweiler as the first woman to broadcast a major league game on radio.

But it was Ford that really changed the game, according to historian James Walker. From 1921 to 1933, the World Series was broadcast as a public service with no commercial sponsor, but as the Great Depression took its toll on the back office, Ford Motor Company bought the broadcast rights for $100,000.

The players got 42%, the clubs took the rest, and the World Series became a valuable property all its own.

But the promise of safety in the ballpark also turned baseball into a civic investment opportunity and an ongoing experiment in American identity.

Fire-prone wooden bleachers were replaced by real stadiums with grandstands, concessions and restrooms, which became multi-use monuments to sport, local pride, myth-, and memory-making. A broader audience created a boom in sports journalism, expanding newspaper readership and fueling the new media of radio. In the decades leading up to the 19th Amendment, the ballpark was one of the few public places where women were included as fans with equal passions and opinions. Speaking of equals, the effort to make baseball “respectable” became a well documented civic integration mechanism for waves of immigrants, who were able to use the communal experience of the sport to enter their American lives with shared norms and values.

And because baseball came to stand for American fairness and opportunity, its grotesque bigotry became harder to defend.

Black sportswriters and Negro League stars used the game’s own standards of talent, statistics, family values, and fair play to argue that the color line contradicted everything baseball claimed to represent. That pressure helped bring Jackie Robinson to the major leagues in 1947.

My simplified version of this history: life is better when everyone is included, considered, and safe.

Here’s where Johnson’s example becomes instructive.

Like many of you, I read the news of the accusation of gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity house with a familiar horror. And, like many of you, I perhaps spent more time than was healthy digging into the details, while generating opinions about the law, administration responsibilities, and why does this keep happening lamentations.

Then I read this opinion piece by Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University.

In it, he shares a story that reminded me of Ban Johnson’s own epiphany.

“A few years after I was appointed to my current role, it became clear that a disproportionate share of Wesleyan’s disciplinary infractions were tied to parties at the large houses of three all-male fraternities,” he begins. Surveys showed academic infractions of all kinds, including alcohol consumption requiring hospitalization and “harrowing” cases of sexual assault.

“The problem of sexual assault was not confined to fraternities alone, but reasonable people — and insurance companies! — saw a high degree of risk in these institutions,” he says.

He shares his information gathering, analysis, and stakeholder process in some detail, but I’ll skip to the controversial reveal: buoyed by a resolution from the student government, Roth concluded that fraternities could remain open, but only if they admitted women.

His career has survived the predictable blowback, and he reports that as social spaces are no longer controlled by male-only institutions, sexual assaults are way down. “Violence against women and trans people is still far too prevalent nationwide, and many incidents go unreported,” he says. “Our campus continues to be plagued by these factors, but people who see someone in a vulnerable position here are more likely to speak up than they were in the past.”

It’s also been an opportunity to have rich conversations about the lives of students, and how the very institutions fraternity members sought to protect had discriminated in the past.

I understand that there are no easy answers here. But the questions are worth parsing, because I know what a shared cultural experience can mean for individuals, families, communities, and civic life.

So once more for the cheap seats: life is better when everyone is included, considered, and safe.

And that’s a design constraint we can all embrace.

Ellen McGirt
Editor-in-Chief
Ellen@designobserver.com

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This edition of  The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.

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Some fine print

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Observed

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning is open, and it’s spectacular. The 1894 brick storage facility is now a light-filled vision. “The project speaks volumes about where the design profession is heading these days,” notes Bloomberg’s Kriston Capps. “It’s a conscious exercise in retrofitting an existing building rather than building something new, which may well be the majority of the work students will be doing when they graduate.”

What’s in a stripe? About $500 million, conservatively. Adidas has sued Australian fashion brand White Fox Boutique for selling clothes featuring a four-stripe design that Adidas says is “deceptively similar to its own three-stripe trademark.” The court injunction would ask White Fox to surrender profits earned from the products. The Guardian has the numbers involved and buried the lede: the justice hearing the case is Ian Jackman, brother of Hugh.

Sit up straight when you speak her name. A new show at the Met remembers that Jackson Pollack was married to one helluva painter. Lee Krasner’s full range is on display, including tantalizing glimpses into their shared lives — as some of his rejected material finds its way into her collages. “Krasner is finally getting her due — and on her own terms,” says NPR.

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End marks

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