Ballpark concessions pioneer Harry M. Stevens once described New York City’s Polo Grounds, former home of three of the city’s Major League Baseball teams, as a place where “you would find a prominent banker eating a frankfurter and drinking a glass of beer, and beside him would be a truck driver doing precisely the same thing.”

Anyone attending Opening Day this year at Yankee Stadium or Citi Field, however, will be unlikely to find fans of similar wealth and income disparities interacting. While contemporary ballparks clearly belie historical understandings of ballparks as sites of egalitarian intermixing, even those historical understandings are flawed. Ballparks were never accessible to all, yet the rhetoric calling them so was both powerful and reified the notion that the people who were regularly in the ballpark — middle- and upper-class white men — were the core of American society.

From the game’s professional origins, teams charged different prices in different parts of the ballpark. Moreover, when Sunday baseball was illegal and all games were day games — as was the case in New York until 1919 and in other northeastern cities into the 1930s — few working-class fans could go to the park because nearly all games took place during their regular working hours. Rarely if ever were women described as true fans and the methods owners employed to attract them were often demeaning.

As white flight and suburbanization changed the demographics of cities after World War II, the neighborhoods around a number of ballparks become poorer and less white. Many of the middle- and upper-class white fans who frequented baseball games no longer lived near ballparks; instead, they lived in places like Westchester, Long Island, and northern New Jersey where they relied on automobiles for transportation.

At the same time, overt racism and classism were increasingly socially unacceptable, so teams made fans feel comfortable by allowing them drive to games and park in well-lit parking lots, rather than explicitly bar anyone. The postwar generation of stadiums had more tiers, which added new financial barriers to full access to the fan experience, and were more difficult for working-class fans and fans of color to access than their predecessors because they were often poorly served by mass transportation. All that division gave middle- and upper-class white fans a space that felt safe because it was anything but equally accessible to all Americans, yet importantly retained the appearance of inclusivity because the barriers to attendance were covert.

Observers today comment on the divisions at the ballpark more than they used to, but what they describe as decreased egalitarianism at contemporary ballparks is as much an increase in the visibility of the barriers to full access to the fan experience that had always existed as it is anything else. In other words, to many white, male fans — the demographic of people most often, but not exclusively, making claims about the inclusive nature of the fan experience—ballparks of the last 35 years feel less egalitarian because the barriers and segmentation that used to only impact other people have been modified to have an impact on them as well.

Even today, new barriers are being added. Earlier this month, the Texas Rangers installed the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at their ballpark, which depicts a member of the law enforcement organization the team is named after. Doug Swanson, author of Cult of Glory, an authoritative history of law enforcement’s Rangers, explains that the statue is modeled on Ranger E.J. Banks, who is most well known for being dispatched by the state’s governor to keep Black students from enrolling in an all-white public school in 1956. In choosing to install this statue, baseball’s Rangers have created a barrier to attendance for anyone who knows Banks’s story and is opposed to segregation, but especially to Black Texans.

Places like ballparks that were supposedly open to everyone, but, due to cost, location and a lack of welcoming atmosphere for some Americans, were not truly open to all allowed the patrons who could more easily access them to conceive of a nation composed almost exclusively of people like themselves.

Examining the baseball fan experience tells us that middle- and upper-class white Americans wanted to spend their free time in spaces that felt inclusive but were far from open to everyone. The fan experience, however, was designed not to remind middle- and upper-class white Americans that they had paid to be separated from others, instead that separation was made to feel natural.

At ballparks, therefore, middle- and upper-class white Americans were not prompted to think about the limits of American democracy, rendering them unlikely to notice those limits in other places as well.

Seth S. Tannenbaum is a historian and assistant professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University. His book, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark will be published on March 31 by the University of Illinois Press.

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