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.