Courtesy of the St. Louis Cardinals
This time last year, St. Louis was a city of celebration. Fresh off the Blues' first-ever Stanley Cup win, we were watching a Cardinals run that would end in the National League Championship Series, awaiting confirmation of a new Major League Soccer team, and for Mizzou fans, following a promising new football recruit who'd recently transferred from Clemson.
Of all the things COVID-19 has changed about day-to-day life in St. Louis, one of the biggest changes is the constant flow of sports. Major League Baseball is set to return for a shortened season on July 23, with the Cardinals playing the Pirates on July 24 at 7:15 p.m. Whether fans will eventually be let in—and how many and where they'll be allowed to sit—is all still a question mark. But Busch Stadium will hardly resemble its usual crowded, vibrant energy. According to Noah Cohan, a lecturer at Washington University who researches the impact of sports and fandom, that lost in-person experience is part of a larger sense of grief that sports fan across St. Louis and the country are feeling during COVID-19.
Cohan's research explores how cheering for a team can become part of someone’s identity. Cohan’s 2019 book, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sports, explores how fans build that identity, both consciously and subconsciously. One of the biggest fan narratives he’s watching unfold before him now is what people do when they must press pause on an essential aspect of who they are.
“Sports are a profoundly meaningful part of people’s identities,” Cohan says. “Even if your team is not on a run to the World Series or there's not a transcendent player, just the day-to-day rhythm of following a team on TV or in the newspaper with someone you care about can ingrain a connection to that team. Yes, it's commercialized, but that doesn't make the experience any less real for people. So to go months and months with that piece of your identity just inaccessible gives a profound sense of loss.”
Photography from Washington University in St. Louis.
Noah Cohan is a lecturer in the American Cultural Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores sports fandoms and fan narratives.
On July 10, the CDC reported more than 60,000 new COVID-19 cases from the day before. Even with the growing numbers, professional sports leagues are trying to squeeze as many games in as possible. They’ve presented plans of playing empty stadiums, quarantining all players during the season, following strict testing and social-distancing guidelines—anything to come back in some form. Cohan says that's driven by economics, but that those economics are premised on fans’ “desperate, desperate desire” to have these games back in their lives.
When the MLB arrived in Arizona and Florida on July 1 to restart their spring training, every player, coach, and staff member was tested for COVID-19 upon arrival. The NHL is set to restart on July 13, with officials monitoring players' temperatures and symptoms daily. With the leagues playing semi-normally, Cohan expects many fans to undergo a process of reaffirming these pieces of their identity, a process that might change the fan experience.
In a regular year, watching baseball nightly on TV is—for Cohan and probably many others—“the background of our lives.” However, he thinks baseball will be disrupted the most because it is so regionalized and has missed more of its season than other major sports. He predicts an adjustment period when there is suddenly a game every day again. While some fans will ultimately rediscover watching the sport as a source of identity, others might decide they don’t need that rhythm in their everyday life.
“The specific cultural rituals of baseball, things like the fresh-cut grass and singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," those are more tied to that in-person experience,” Cohan says. “Of course, there are millions of Cardinals fans every year who don't get to go to a game. But to know that no one can, I think will be strange and difficult for people. Baseball still has that ‘America’s national pastime’ ethos around it, so an empty stadium has a greater impact on the understanding and representation of the game than it does for the other sports.”
Cohan also says sports’ hiatus is being felt not only as a gap in the cultural landscape on its own, but also as a lost security blanket for people as their brains interpret the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased awareness of Black Lives Matter—their brains sense something fundamentally not normal. “People are feeling this great absence,” he says. “Sports is an escape for many, many people, and to not have that place to go impacts their psyche.”
