Page 164 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 153

Bale (1994) suggested that sportscapes may generate either topophilia (love of
place) or topophobia (fear of place). Visual pleasures associated with a place, and the
intersensory experiences of being there, are an important part of topophilia. Much is
in the detail: ‘landscapes of sports possess many elements often rather small features
which are taken for granted by those who daily pass them by, which are . . . icons for
the sports fan’ (Bale 1994: 135). The noises, smells and sounds of sportscapes are
part of the sense of place experienced by fans: ‘often the sound of sport greets the fan
before the sight of it’ (Bale 1994: 139).

Case Study: Strategies and Tactics in Fenway Park

It comes back to why the ballparks matter to us—because exactly comparable
people played a comparable game in this ballpark for generation after generation.
—George Will

The Red Sox baseball franchise can be conceived of as a strategy in de Certeau’s
terms for the club to manage relations with its competitors, adversaries and clien-

teles. Strategies can be understood as dynamic ways that specific enterprises defi ne,
demarcate, identify and sustain themselves. Strategies of sport organisations work in
part though their capacity to exercise some element of control over the fans, encour-
aging particular forms of behaviour and creating a commitment to and consumption
of a place and its products. The Red Sox franchise has been highly successful in this
regard. Filling their stadium, Fenway Park, for each home game (eighty-one games)
is a sign of a club’s success and an ongoing task for the owners and operators of
Major League Baseball’s thirty ballparks. The Boston Red Sox have successfully
sold out all of their games for eight seasons in a row and hosted over 400 consecutive
sell-out games (‘MLB Shatters’ 2007). In 2007, 2,970,755 fans watched the Red Sox
play in home games. Successful strategies have also been required to manage these
high attendance fi gures.
In response to organisational strategies, Red Sox fans may be said to engage in
tactics, the activities of the less powerful who nevertheless exercise their own forms
of resistance and appropriation of spaces. Tactics refer to those moments when the
weak are victorious over the strong and when they can manoeuvre and take advan-
tage of opportunities to act in their own interests, express their views and incorporate
their own needs within spaces. Fans do not simply act as passive, obedient consum-
ers, but engage in resistant practices that may subvert or deviate from the intentions
of the Red Sox management. Tactics involve cleverness, trickery and quick thinking,
as fans are subject to the panoptic gaze of the more powerful strategic enterprise. An
exploration, based on observation, of the sensory, mediated experience of the journey
to Fenway Park on game day can help to illuminate some of the strategies and tactics
of the Red Sox and their fans.