The Dugout

The Art Institute in Chicago (one of my favorite museums) has hung its very first Norman Rockwell painting. “The Dugout,” originally created as a cover illustration for The Saturday Post, features a scene of utter dejection, as a jeering crowd shouts at the losing Chicago Cubs. According to The Norman Rockwell Museum, the Cubs finished at the bottom of the league that year, so the mood of the team was probably reflective of the city’s baseball fans.

What strikes me so much about this painting is the complexity of the multiple planes. Up front, we have a very young player standing alone, arms hung at his sides and looking at the ground in sorrow. He’s got a few stains at his knees and his hat is askew. Behind him, is an older player or coach, holding a glove with two hands. Most of his face is obscured by that front figure’s sleeve, but we can really get the feeling of frustration just through his eyes.

Behind them are other figures from the team, leaning back in the dugout, faces and heads in hands, slumped against the wall in the same slouchy manner as the towels hanging from the dugout roof. Two of these men have their heads tilted towards each other, as if they’re speaking through their hands. The third has his elbow perched on his knee and his hand clutching his shin. Like that earlier figure, we don’t see his full face, as it’s obscured by his hat and by the front figure - but we see half of his unreadable expression, as he looks away from his teammates.

Behind and above the players are the brightly lit, gleeful faces of a crowd on the winning side. Each of these faces has a unique expression and most of them are angled in different directions. The effect makes for a lively but kind of upsetting crowd scene. While the faces are happy, they are also cruel, and the fact that we can see the expressions of all of the men they’re jeering creates an emotional tension that isn’t easily ignored.

Sports creates communities from strangers, but it also creates enemies of strangers as well. John Green speaks to this in his podcast Anthropocene Reviewed when he addresses sports rivalries and how some Liverpool fans still chant about the 1958 plane crash which resulted in the death of eight Manchester United players and three staff members. While that was shocking to me when I first heard it, that kind of behavior isn’t that far off from what I see in the ballpark from time to time. Such cruelty wouldn’t be considered acceptable in other contexts but is often taken as standard because of historic “rivalry.” It’s a complication of sports that isn’t often talked about beyond the eruption of riots and actual violence, and I like that Rockwell’s painting worries at the edges of those moments a bit.