Wanting Different Things from Baseball: Class and Competing Community Values in a Gentrifying Neighborhood.

The paper explores an encounter between parents of different class backgrounds who meet in the context of children?s neighborhood baseball following a process of neighborhood gentrification in Philadelphia. Their encounter permits not just a look at how sport, in this case baseball, structured and processed neighborhood tensions but also how the competing class cultures of the two groups created conflicting expectations about rights in and responsibilities toward public space and voluntary organizations. Evidence supporting this paper included: a) participant observation with a baseball organization over a decade; b) two years of systematic ethnographic fieldwork involving observations of more than 100 games in two boys? age divisions and; c) 40 in-depth interviews with coaches and parents of the league. Differences in the way old-timers and newcomers related both to the neighborhood and to the league reflected a competing set of cultural values related to individual responsibility, group solidarity, and how best to promote children?s interests, a contrast between ?hierarchical communalism? and ?child-centered individualism.? The local space of boys? baseball provides an opportunity to understand how these tensions unfolded over a thirty year period, leaving a space where class tension ?trumped? race tensions as cross-class sympathies slowly evolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]