Copied to several additional national sportswriters, analysts and play-by-play announcers, the original draft of this email was sent to Wall Street Journal baseball writer Jared Diamond who, with pennant races heating up and dozens of other stories worthy of coverage, chose to amplify Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson’s musings about Major League Baseball’s purported “need” for more man-child clowning as seen in the NBA and NFL. Anderson says baseball and its staid traditions of comportment are “corny” and not “cool” enough to attract younger fans.
Dear Jared,
If by “cool” White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson means an inability or unwillingness to behave humbly and with a mature focus on the team instead of one’s “brand,” he shouldn’t presume to speak as an authority about what baseball needs [“A Push to Make Baseball ‘Cool’ Again,” A14, Aug. 12].
Yankee great Joe DiMaggio never had an Instagram account, never flipped a bat, never boasted, gesticulated or looked to embarrass or humiliate an opponent, and he never slapped women around or sired any children out of wedlock. Yet his unassailable coolness is immortalized in a Simon & Garfunkel song we’ll still be singing, whistling and humming long after anyone can remember Tim Anderson’s name.
Not that look-at-me Mr. Anderson isn’t entitled to his opinion. This is America, and he’s free to believe that MLB needs more man-child clowns like those who “shoosh” NBA crowds or choreograph NFL endzone dances. But that doesn’t mean WSJ’s lead baseball writer should take such beliefs seriously, much less help publicize them. (Jerry West never shooshed a crowd, and Jim Brown and Walter Payton never danced in the endzone.)
Remember just a year ago when woke media were taking BLM Marxists seriously as they burned court houses and police stations to demand the defunding of police and a normalization of fatherless chaos? Well, city councils, mayors, prosecutors, governors and various federal policy makers were influenced by that media coverage and went about castrating police. That castration has led directly to today’s exploding homicide rates in Tim Anderson’s Chicago and other cities all across the country, with minority neighborhoods suffering the highest body counts. And MLB needs running gun battles in and around its ballparks like it needs another players’ strike.
So if baseball owners and players want to groom a new generation of nonviolent fans, they’ll politely eschew Mr. Anderson’s preference for going all ghetto “cool” and instead wrest back control from the MIT and Cal Tech algorithm geeks who never played past Little League but have nonetheless been granted license to normalize four-hour games.
Want to end radical, rally-killing defensive shifts in two weeks? Teach the launch angle-obsessed ‘roid boyz to bunt and stroll to first with infield singles. Want much shorter games and pitch counts, fewer pitching changes, and more balls in play so the likes of Mr. Anderson can flash more leather and wow more young fans? Coach pitchers to be more like Koufax and Gibson, ashamed to throw a 58-foot slider to an eighth hitter on 0-2. Strike the punk out or make him hit your best pitch.
The only reason baseball at the moment might be considered “uncool” by any sensible adult raised in a two-parent household and able to afford a $250 family night at the ballpark is that no one but insomniacs and ESPN’s resident night owl Mike Wilbon can stay awake till the final out. When games drag on so long that even the next day’s sports page can’t offer a box score, it’s no wonder our screen-addicted, ADHD kids are drifting away.
But with all due respect to Mr. Anderson — an outstanding shortstop and, in my book (best all-around player on best team), legitimate AL MVP contender — the solution is not an infusion of more man-child hubris and clowning. Grown-up, professional conduct by athletes on and off the field should never be considered “corny.” It should forever be the ideal.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.