Baseball and American Vice Theme Analysis

Baseball in The Natural looks different from how readers might picture it today. Disorganized, low-paying, and unglamorous, American baseball of the mid-twentieth century hardly seems desirable as a career path, and Malamud’s descriptions of the game attest to the dishonesty and tyranny of its bosses and players. Throughout the novel, Malamud examines American society through the lens of baseball, a quintessentially American sport, ultimately arguing that both are steeped in cruelty and corruption.

Malamud portrays baseball as an inherently savage game, controlled by vicious players and corrupt managers. Though the game is often understood as a classic American pastime—competitive yet entertaining—The Natural depicts the baseball diamond as a battlefield instead, underscoring the prevalence of violence in American life. According to The Natural, American society views violence not as gruesome and abhorrent, but as entertainment or spectacle. Baseball for Malamud is a grotesque circus: a “zoo full of oddballs” occupies the Knights’ “patched and peeling” stadium stands. Action between the players is often intense and violent—at one point in the novel, Hobbs is described as holding his bat, nicknamed Wonderboy, “above his head as if prepared to beat a rattlesnake to death.” Bump, Hobbs’s rival, is killed on the field by running into a stadium wall, and the players are even cruel to one another off the field—destroying Hobbs’s uniform, for example, and mercilessly competing for a top position on the team. Baseball in The Natural is not merely a pastime or a career path; it embodies hostility and aggressive masculinity, populated by rapid fans (many of whom harass or even assault the players) and sportsmen intent on destruction and domination. Yet it appeals to American spectators precisely because of its violent vitality, which makes it captivating, even enthralling. By exposing baseball’s grotesqueness, Malamud demonstrates just how perverse it is that American society views the sport as entertainment: the novel suggests that fundamentally, baseball is a sport reliant on cruelty and aggression.

In many ways, Malamud’s descriptions of baseball correspond to the prevailing mood of 1950s America. The mid-twentieth century in the United States saw the beginning of the Red Scare, a period of widespread fear and vicious accusation, and the violent Korean War. By focusing on the violent aspects of baseball, a sport entrenched in the American collective consciousness, Malamud suggests that violence, too, is ingrained in American culture. This is a nation founded, in many ways, on the principle of domination (conquering territory and native people), and one that thus carries violence and savagery with it, which even seeps into dugouts and playing fields. Capitalism also plays a role in baseball’s unscrupulous reputation. Namely, Judge Banner’s immoral greed reflects the game’s intimate ties to business and the accumulation of wealth, pointing more broadly to American corruption. In emphasizing baseball’s centrality to American culture—an object of national obsession—Malamud also emphasizes its ties to American vice, violence, and corruption. In The Natural, baseball is a mirror that Malamud holds up to American society, meant to expose its sins and deficiencies. Hobbs’s manager, Pop Fisher, warns Hobbs that Judge Banner (whose first name, ironically, is “Goodwill”) “will peel the skin off of your behind without you knowing it if you don’t watch out.” The Judge’s dishonest actions—many of which he is able to enact by bending the rules of the judicial system—determine Hobbs’s fate and control the game, creating a rigged system in which even a player as talented as Hobbs cannot find success. Similarly, 1950s American society saw the beginnings of extreme wealth inequality (after the national economic boom experienced during World War II) and the rise of corporate culture. With these developments came a rebirth in the financial crime and corruption first experienced in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, then, Baseball’s connection to corruption and greed in the novel can be read as a commentary on America’s long-standing offenses: the sport reflects the culture in which it is rooted.

Overall, The Natural is a far cry from the sort of jaunty, picaresque novel that many “sports novels” of the 1950s were: cheerful tales of triumph and good sportsmanship. Instead, Malamud uses baseball as a pretense to peel back America’s skin and examine its debauched interior, and its fixation on—and perverse enjoyment of—wealth, greed, and violence.