On Hierarchy in Mr. Baseball
As with virtually every team sport, baseball teams commonly make use of the language of the family to describe the nature of the relationships that exist between members of the team and amongst the organisation as a whole. The most obvious example of this is the 1979 “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates, but examples abound throughout the sport. By couching itself in these terms, baseball not only reinforces its preferred image as a wholesome, fundamental aspect of American society but also softens, however subtly, some of the rougher, more business-like truths that underlie the sport. Baseball serves much the same purpose in Japan, albeit tailored to the specifics of Japanese societal expectations, as Robert Whiting explains in his books The Chrysanthemum and the Bat (1977) and You Gotta Have Wa (1989). In describing how Japanese baseball reflects its society, Whiting states “The Japanese view of life, stressing group identity, cooperation, hard work, respect for age and seniority, and ‘face’ has permeated nearly every aspect of [baseball], giving it a distinct character of its own” (1977).
Fred Schepisi’s 1992 film Mr. Baseball attempts to capture this “distinct character” and translate it for American audiences, and while the film is often dismissed (if not outright overlooked) by baseball fans it is, in fact, a particularly enlightening look at the manipulation of the hierarchical family unit in a baseball context. In its depiction of both biological and professional family relationships, the film offers a clear and easy-to-understand example of the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of filiation and the arborescent.
Baseball teams, like any other family unit, function through a series of power relations. These power relations are, necessarily, hierarchical in nature — the owner exerts power over the general manager, the general manager exerts power over the manager, and the manager exerts power (at least in theory) over the players. Likewise, within the playing group there exist hierarchical relations based on seniority. This dynamic is occasionally (albeit rarely) complicated by ability — a young player who is exceptional may exert considerable influence amongst the playing group even if he has far less seniority than other players — however, aside from those very rare instances where this is the case, the players themselves almost always conform to the same hierarchy that the organisation as a whole does. This hierarchy can be described as one based on the Deleuzoguattarian concept of filiation (or affiliation). Relations of filiation are, as Ian Buchanan explains, “linear in composition (uniting father and son to form a lineage)” (2008, p.99). Furthermore, they are based on traditionally rigid Oedipal family structures. This is an expansion of work done by Michel Foucault, who describes the family unit as a site which promotes “subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization,” and as such is inherently fascistic (1983, p.xiii).
Deleuze and Guattari expand on this in their two-part Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Inspired by genealogical family trees, they describe the traditional family hierarchy as “arborescent” in nature — “[a]rborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centres of significance and subjectification… an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along pre-established paths” (1000P, 2013, p.16). In a baseball context, this arborescent structure can be understood through the flow of power and decision-making: the general manager signs the players and the manager must do what he can with them; the player is played in the position the manager (and, more and more frequently, the general manager) decides, and must do his best. (Shades of Wil Myers, but I digress…)
The main protagonist of Mr. Baseball, Tom Selleck’s Jack Elliot, is presented as a character who pushes back against this structure at every opportunity. Indeed, it is made clear throughout the film that this would-be impudence is part of his attraction — he embodies the baseball-specific combination of a cocksure, arrogant façade belying the fragile ego that is an occupational hazard for so many who make their living in a sport that is often referred to as a game of failure.
To suggest that Elliot is fundamentally against the arborescent structure of baseball would be incorrect; he has, after all, spent his life in that structure and even desired to be a part of it before he actually was — remember his admission “I’ve been a baseball player all my life. Even before I was a baseball player I was a baseball player. I don’t think I could be anything else.” Rather, it is Elliot’s realisation that he is now at the wrong end of the power relation that leads him to reject the traditional hierarchical structure of a baseball team.
The central conflict of the film, then, is Elliot’s struggle to come to terms with his new reality while also attempting to re-establish his pre-eminence within the tree-like family structure of his new team. In this regard, setting the film in Japan is a crucial aspect of the drama, for nowhere in the world has a baseball culture quite like Japan, where the game is viewed as “a moral discipline… a tool of education for developing purity and self-discipline” (Whiting, 1989, p.29). Japanese baseball teams, perhaps more than anywhere else the game is played, are arborescent in nature. Elliot upends this arborescence in several ways, some conscious others not, as demonstrated in the scene where he first meets his manager, Uchiyama-san:
What is critical to understand, however, is what Elliot is not attempting to do — that is, destroy the arborescent hierarchy that so rigidly defines baseball, Japanese or otherwise. The opposite of the tree-like arborescent structure is the more free-flowing structure that Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome. Inspired by the rhizome found in botany (think potatoes or ginger root), rhizomatic structure has no hierarchy, rather connections can be made in any direction in the same way that the roots grow out of a central node. A rhizome is fundamentally anti-hierarchical, the rhizomatic necessarily the opposite of the arborescent. Elliot, it bears repeating, does not want to convert the fundamental structure of his baseball team into a rhizomatic one. Rather, he wants to regain his previous standing at the top of the arborescent structure. His attempts at this fail because he is viewed by both his manager and teammates (and, indeed, society at large) as someone trying to change the structure of the team from arborescent to rhizomatic. It is only once he publicly acknowledges the importance of the arborescent structure that he is able to re-position himself as a powerful figure within that structure, as the two scenes below demonstrate. In the first, Elliot prostrates himself before his family, as it were, and accepts that he must conform to their fascistic, pyramidal hierarchization, to return to Foucault’s terminology.
The second scene portrays a conversation between Elliot and Uchiyama. Elliot has now become incorporated back into the family unit, and with his skill having returned (the scene immediately preceding this shows him hitting a homerun and being proclaimed by the fans and his teammates) he now feels comfortable challenging Uchiyama for a more powerful position within the arborescent family of the team:
Had Elliot attempted to contradict his manager in this way before acknowledging his own desire for the structure of the arborescent family, this scene would have conveyed a significantly different message. It would have been understood as an act of rebellion, rather than the exercising of power that it actually is. Ultimately, Elliot is able to assert his authority because he no longer represents the threat that the rhizome poses to the traditional hierarchical family.
This is most clearly visible in the subtle yet significant costume changes that Elliot undergoes over the course of the film. While he is still outside of the family structure, he is shown using American equipment, with a particular focus on his Franklin batting gloves shown in every closeup shot of Elliot at the plate. After being accepted into the unit, however, the film makes it very clear (through the use of a two-second extreme closeup on his hands) that he has switched glove brands from Franklin to Japanese company Mizuno. This change serves as a visual representation of his newfound ability to succeed within the structure he previously confronted.
Ultimately, what makes Mr. Baseball an intriguing film from a theoretical perspective is the fact that Elliot fails in virtually every one of his goals. It may not be as obvious as, say, Bull Durham (1988), which is rightfully lauded for its atypical ending, but Mr. Baseball is nevertheless overlooked in this regard. Yes, Elliot’s “family” succeeds by finally beating the rival Giants, but he doesn’t break Uchiyama’s homerun record, and more significantly he doesn’t return to MLB as a player. By the end of the film this doesn’t matter to him, however, because he has been rewarded in a different way, one more in keeping with the hierarchical structure of a baseball organisation. Rather than achieve individual accolades, he is rewarded by moving up within the hierarchy — he is now the “chief” of his own family structure. Elliot has been fully assimilated into the hierarchy of baseball, and his desire for individual achievement has been superseded by a desire to satisfy the expectations placed upon him by that arborescent and wield power over those subordinate to him in his “family tree” that is his team. This ending, then, reinforces Foucault’s contention that to succumb to the traditional family structure is to succumb to “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (1983, p.xiii).
Works Cited
Buchanan, I., 2008. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated from French by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, 2013. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated from French by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury.
Whiting, R., 1977. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat. Nishi-Kawaguchi, Japan: Japanime Co. Ltd. (e-book)
Whiting, R., 1989. You Gotta Have Wa. New York: Vintage Departures.
Filmography
Bull Durham, 1988. Directed by Ron Shelton. USA: The Mount Company.
Mr. Baseball, 1992. Directed by Fred Schepisi. USA: Outlaw Productions.