Seamheads Versus Soapheads

My guess is that very few visitors to this website follow soap operas. Judging by the names on the comments that follow articles, the overwhelming majority of visitors to this web site are men, and soap operas are not a pastime that many men would admit to, even if they were regular viewers. No offense to the gender issues crowd, but soap operas, though not as girly as My Little Pony, definitely belong in the female column.

Male or female, watching soap operas might imply that one has too much time on one’s hands, which is something close to sin in an achievement-oriented society. But one could apply the same reasoning to watching sports on TV.

As a baseball fan, you have more in common with soap opera aficionados than you might think. And it’s not just because one is a show and the other is The Show. Of course, soap operas, like baseball, started on radio before graduating to television – so annoying commercials have long been a part of both. Considering that soap operas were so named because they were typically sponsored by soap manufacturers, and baseball games feature a surfeit of beer commercials, you could justifiably refer to both genres as suds operas.

Like soap opera, baseball is a daily thing, at least in season. The typical soap opera offers five episodes a week; in baseball, five games a week is the minimum. Six or seven games a week is more likely. From April through September, each major league baseball team broadcasts 162 “episodes.” During those 26 weeks, a soap opera will have only 130 shows. Veterans on major league rosters are akin to long-term recurring characters on soap operas. Both baseball and soap operas have short-timers who appear in a few games/episodes and then disappear.

When you don’t have the time to watch or listen to a game, you can always check the newspaper, the TV news, or the internet to find out what happened. Same with soap operas. You can track the narratives on Soap Central without ever watching the shows.

Soap opera and baseball fans can check the internet every day to see how their favorite characters/players are doing. When a ballplayer makes a couple of errors or strikes out four times in a game, it’s kind of like a soap opera character having a bad day…finding out one’s mate is having an affair, or one’s kid is selling drugs, or one has just lost one’s job, or the lab results came back positive. Whatever, life goes on and tomorrow is another day.

Of course, sometimes life goes on with another team. For any number of reasons, ballplayers are released or put on waivers. In soap operas, a number of actors are written out of the storyline. As free agents, they can sign with any other soap opera. I don’t think there is the soap opera equivalent of trading players, but for sure some actors have appeared in more than one soap series. Unlike a major league team, a soap opera does not have a 25-man or 40-man limit to its roster, but there are limits to the viewer’s ability to keep track of a number of characters in interwoven plots.

Also like soap operas, the real lives of the players often bleed into the regular news. As a cursory look at the internet proves, the private lives of actors and athletes are fair game for the media.

In the old days, the entertainment industry’s PR machine made sure positive images accompanied movie and sports stars; only the most egregious crimes made the paper. Lesser misdeeds of actors and athletes were covered up.

At the same time, sportswriters left a number of things unsaid when reporting on ballplayers, even such well-chronicled figures as Babe Ruth. Of course, this was an era when White House correspondents never said a word about Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis, even though all of them had seen him in his wheelchair.

One obvious difference between soaps and baseball is that soap opera characters are fictional; ballplayers are real people. People talk about soap opera characters as though they are real people they know. And sports fans talk about ballplayers as though they know them personally, even though the only time they see them in person is when they attend a ball game or stand in an autograph line at a card show. (Of course, there are always groupies and autograph hounds who know where players like to hang out and make an effort to find them.)

Economically, there are some differences between soap opera characters and ballplayers. Soap operas tend to deal with upper middle class to upper class folks; major league baseball players’ incomes are in the same range, but they tend to be nouveau riche.

People certainly develop “relationships” with athletes in other sports, but it’s not analogous to soap operas. Football, for example, is not a daily occurrence; it’s a lot more hot air than action. For a few days before the game, the media analysts focus on what is likely to happen on game day; then comes game day; then comes Monday morning quarterbacking, which could easily fall on Tuesday or Friday if the teams in question played on Monday or Thursday Night Football.

Whatever day it starts, the post-game gabfest may drag out even longer after a tough or controversial loss. That just isn’t a soap opera trajectory. Football is a couple of days of foreplay, one day of intercourse, and a couple of days of afterplay.

Basketball and hockey are irregular. You might have back-to-back games, you might have several days off. They play more frequently than football teams, but there really isn’t much of a cadence to the schedule. It’s too herky-jerky.

Baseball is closer to a sine wave…a new game every day, some ups, some downs, and some flatline days, much like a soap opera. Soap operas are closer to the rhythm of daily life than other fictional shows on TV, just as baseball is closer than other sports to said rhythm. Game over…go home…go to sleep…get up and do it all over again. Just like a regular job but without the cubicle.

Actually, you could probably fashion a soap opera around the travails of a professional baseball team: another day, another game, another drama. The possible plot lines boggle the mind! Consider:

A pitcher seduces the wife of his battery mate.

An aging veteran has a running battle with his hipster son who thinks baseball is strictly for geezers.

A player is traded to a team whose manager once cut him from a minor league roster.

A married player picks up an STD while on a road trip and has some explaining to do after his wife discovers his antibiotic prescription.

A team physician develops a substance abuse problem.

A Julliard-trained actor, depressed by his career as a team mascot, develops a drinking problem.

A left-fielder has an affair with the left-field ball girl and impregnates her…will she seek out prenatal care or an abortionist?

Given enough time, I’m sure I could come up with more, but you get the idea. (Come to think of it, the life of Jose Canseco provides a multitude of soap opera plots.) In fact, you could even steal the titles of some real soap operas. For example:

Ryan’s Hope – Young Reid Ryan faces enormous challenges every day in attempting to make a contending team out of a perennial also-ran. With the guidance of his grizzled, savvy Hall of Fame father, he endures setbacks and relishes minor triumphs in the Energy City.

Search for Tomorrow – A team with a lackluster past and scant hope for the future tries to find a glimmer of hope on Chicago’s North Side.

General Hospital – The life and loves of surgeons who perform Tommy John surgery on major league pitchers.

The Haves and the Have Nots – Take a gander at the final standings for 2014 and pick your teams accordingly.

The Young and the Restless – After a salary dump, a major league front office decides to go with a youth movement, bringing in a horde of brash young men eager to establish themselves as big league ballplayers.

The Bold and the Beautiful – The life and times of major league All-Stars, the trophies they hope to earn, and their stormy relationships with their trophy wives.

All My Children – A cantankerous old manager who has experienced all of baseball’s highs and lows is put in charge of a short-season, Rookie League team.

Peyton Place – In the Mile High City, an aging quarterback faces the weekly challenge of leading his team to victory despite…oh, sorry, wrong sport.

A key similarity that applies to baseball and soap operas is that fans become so familiar with the actors/ballplayers that they refer to them by their first name, even though they’ve never met them. A housewife might call up another fan and say, “Did you see what happened to Julie today?” They both “know” Julie. Hey, they see her at the same time every day during the week. No need to tack on a last name.

And so it goes in the world of sports. To a certain extent, it’s understandable. When a player becomes the face of a franchise (a legend is even better but few teams have one), it is permissible to use his first name or nickname.

And it’s certainly understandable why play-by-play announcers use first names so frequently. They see the hometown players every day and talk to them before and after games on a regular basis. They are literally on a first-name basis with them. But it doesn’t start and end with announcers.

Anyone could refer to Babe Ruth as Babe or the Babe or even the Bambino. If you are a long-time Cardinals fan and you hear someone talking about Stan, you don’t need to ask Stan who? Same with Ernie in Chicago. On the other hand if you were in San Francisco when Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Willie Kirkland were on the roster, you might have to go by last names in order to avoid confusion.

A player named Bill or Joe may need some help, such as Billy Buck (Bill Buckner), or Joe D (Joe DiMaggio) – and a good nickname is always distinctive. If your nickname is Turk, there’s not much room for confusion, unless you play for a team in Istanbul.

The next time you listen to your local sports talk radio show or visit your local sports bar, you will regularly hear people refer to players on local teams by their first names, even though these people are fans, not friends, of the players.

Exactly why people relate so strongly to soap opera actors or baseball players invites speculation. But people have been watching both sports and drama at least since the ancient Greeks. It’s certainly possible that fans who followed the earliest Olympic games felt they knew the athletes. Or if you were a big fan of the plays of Sophocles, you might feel as though you really knew Oedipus. Some ancient playgoers might have found “Eddie” more meaningful than the real people they knew.

Today people find media personalities (thanks to saturation sports programming, ballplayers definitely fit the definition) meaningful. One might lament that tendency, but you can’t dictate to people what they find meaningful in their lives.

You can make like General MacArthur and exalt “duty, honor, country” if you want, and tack on God and family for good measure. Those are the biggies…but they’re not enough for a lot of people, and they don’t work at all for others. Hence the various subcultures of soap opera fans and seamheads, not to mention the cyber-warriors of World of Warcraft, Star Trek/Star Wars geeks, Game of Thrones drones, and so on. Meaning is where you find it – and if you need to dose yourself on a daily basis, soap operas and baseball can meet that demand.

While one might still think of baseball as America’s pastime, the game is definitely international if not quite global. The same could be said of soap operas. They are a staple of television programming in the United States but also in such diverse locales as Lithuania, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan.

Bud Selig, among others, wanted baseball to go global. Well, if baseball follows the pattern of soap operas, people around the world may one day get their daily dish of baseball to go along with their daily soap and their daily bread.

Postscript

Before we leave our discussion of soap operas vis-à-vis baseball, mention must be made of John Beradino, who played for 11 seasons (1939-1942 and 1946-1952) with the Browns, Indians and Pirates. That his 11-year run wrapped around World War II is pretty impressive – but he did even better in the soaps.

After 10 years of miscellaneous roles in movies and TV, Berardino landed the role of Dr. Steve Hardy on General Hospital in 1963. He held that role till he died in 1996. Certainly, baseball could never offer anyone that kind of job security today (admittedly, Connie Mack did even better, but he owned the team). General Hospital – minus Dr. Hardy – is still on the air, by the way.

Berardino was rewarded with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, if you’re interested). As near as I can tell, the only other major league player so honored is Chuck Connors. (If you’re wondering about Bob Uecker, despite his memorable performance as announcer Harry Doyle in the Major League trilogy, his Mr. Belvedere TV series, and 100 or so appearances on The Tonight Show, he has yet to receive a star.