“I Caught the Dream”: The Adult Baseball Camp as Fantasy Leisure

The adult baseball camp is examined as an emergent form of fantasy leisure. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, the authors analyze these camps as an expensive occasion for adult leisure for fans who retain, into adulthood, a fantasy image of themselves as ballplayers. Fantasy camps provide an opportunity for a brief sojurn into a simulated, spring training ambience in the instructional company of ex-big league ballplayers. The purpose is to become engrossed in a pretend world of “real” ballplaying, thereby enabling campers to interact with ballplayers with whom they have sustained imaginary social relations since adolescence.