Epideictic rhetoric and baseball: Nurturing community through controversy

Sports Illustrated,the Mainstream Press and the Enactment of Drug Policy in Major League Baseball

“…Certainly if one considers the most notorious scandals in the history of professional baseball, secondary symbols of fairness and justice emerge. From Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Chicago 'Black Sox' in the 1919 World Series to Pete Rose and allegations that he bet on baseball while managing the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1980s (Matthews, 1995;Denham, 2001), the need to keep the figurative playing field level has nearly always emerged and will probably continue to do so. 5 Bennett and Lawrence (1995: 23), for example, discussed news icons, which, they noted, 'not only dominate the events within which they originate, but are used by journalists to evoke larger cultural themes symbolizing values, contradictions, or changes that have begun to surface in society'.…”