Creating Home-Plate in America: American Exceptionalism and Baseball as Imperialistic Home in Irwin Shaw\u27s Short Fiction, August Wilson\u27s Fences, and William Kennedy\u27s Ironweed

Baseball has often been viewed as unique among the pantheon of American organized sports. Perhaps this view was spawned from baseball\u27s supposedly pastoral origins, but the sport undeniably carries, as Allen Guttmann mentions, a brand as America\u27s pastime (51). For millions of immigrants who entered America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, baseball was the first and primary institution that provided them with a sense of belonging to America. Foreigners ascribed tremendous value to baseball in the nineteenth century, leading the French philosopher Jacques Barzun to comment that no other sport seemed genuinely entwined with a nation\u27s identity (13). Baseball is unique in that it, as a sport, is situated as an institution that embodies the tenets of American exceptionalism by espousing a gospel of belonging. For writers Irwin Shaw, August Wilson, and William Kennedy, baseball operates in a unique function as imperialistic and exceptional, rendering their works subject and dependent to the societal need to belong within baseball that influenced their immigrant forebears. Baseball stadiums and culture eventually rivaled the Protestantism of American exceptionalism as the primary identifier of one\u27s Americanness. Ultimately, for these men, how one relates to baseball is a valid means of judging one\u27s worth to society and to humanity