One of these days I’ll get around to talking about things other than the way USians talk about sports and professional athletes.

Unfortunately, that would require them—both the athletes and the other USians—to be normal for a change, and I see no such prospect on the horizon.

Topics in this piece include: racism, US imperialism, suicide.

By the time Eugenio Suárez ripped a go-ahead double into the left-side gap to retake the lead from the country that cancelled his citizenship interview, it had already become received wisdom that Team USA was a bunch of wooden-faced redasses not worth your time. The morning after Arepa Power (I’ve only ever heard them called Vinotintos, but damned if that’s not the greatest team nickname in baseball history) beat a team full of guys who pretended they would’ve abducted Nicolás Maduro if not for all this money they could make playing baseball, Defector alone ran three different pieces dunking on Team Stolen Valor for being the pinnacle of smugness already associated with the Star-Spangled Banner.

I can only speak for myself, but I have to imagine that this was something of a surprise to those of us who spent the past month being told that, actually, Jack Hughes is for the gays and Canadians were uniquely sore losers at “their” sport. Glad we’re all on the same side now, but with apologies to Tom Hardy, all these columnists adopted hatred for Team USA, and only because they were such petulant assholes that it was impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, I’ve been here so long I’m growing moss.

The level of vitriol aimed at the CapitalOne™️ Patriots was also a bit of a surprise because, predictably, Dumpergate had already reached the point where FanGraphs editors and people with way too many followers perform Rose Mary Woods-ian mental stretches to forgive their favorite emotional support Caucasian ballplayer.¹ It’s become popular to point to the same celebrations I highlighted in my last post and contrast them to the impressively crap vibes of the Joyless Wonders by saying the US has “ruined it’s [sic] national pastime,” implying nostalgia for some halcyon era when USian athletes and sports fans weren’t the double whammy of gracelessness they are now. USian fans are so down bad they’re pretending Cal Raleigh has the intellectual capacity of an incubator-hatched gosling, which is exponentially more disrespectful than anything I’ve ever said about a baseball player.²

With that, I can certainly empathize. It is not a fun headspace to imagine that you are living through the worst things have ever been, especially about a place, a person, or an activity that you love. Given the outsized role³ that professional sports play in USian culture, and how much we are encouraged to treat our chosen sports teams as though they are fundamental to our identities, it’s not surprising that it’s painful to see baseball players wearing your country’s flag behave like LLMs trained on nothing but Lee Greenwood, Toby Keith and a 10,000-page PDF of nothing but the phrase “let’s go.”⁴

The only problem is that, in order to indulge this terrible nostalgia, you have to either know very little about the history of baseball in the United States, or else stick your fingers in your ears and try, as hard as you can, to drown out the thudding immelodic threnody trying to correct your defiance of reality.

There Was No “Golden Era” of U.S. Baseball

Let’s call bread bread and wine wine here: since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, baseball has been extremely hospitable to joyless cop-coded white guys with sticks up their asses.

This is probably not a surprise to you if you know much about the history of professional baseball in the United States. After all, the National League exists today because William Hulbert decided the freewheeling NAPBBP circuits were too susceptible to a litany of sins, which in his view included everything from irregular scheduling and throwing games—he would famously ban four players for life after the 1877 Louisville Grays threw the pennant—to the unconscionable crime of playing baseball on Sundays.

Among the players, “cop-coded” rises from insult to almost factual statement. An extremely cursory search, using the metric of “Guys Whose Names I Remember From OOTP Historical Sims,” turns up Henry Austin, who played for the Elizabeth Resolutes (great name, by the way) before becoming the local Police Commissioner.

Austin, or perhaps Charlie Pabor, who at least presumably spent some of the New Haven Police Department’s time harassing Yalebirds, might be the least objectionable one of this bunch. Other luminaries of the baseball-to-police pipeline include Jim Devlin and Bill Craver, whose lifetime bans from baseball and (in Craver’s case) longtime reputation for crooked play and general tomfoolery apparently did not preclude them from a career in upholding law and order.⁵

There’s also County Cork’s own Tony Mullane, the “Apollo of the Box” (again: great nickname), whose response to being paired with catcher Fleet Walker—one of the first Black men to play major league baseball and, according to Mullane himself, “the best catcher [he] ever worked with”—was to throw whatever he wanted, because God forbid he listen to a man with a different skin color.⁶ With attitudes like that, Mullane would fit right into a lot of current police departments, let alone their 19th-century analogues.

Nor should Mullane alone shoulder the burden of exemplifying racism from 19th-century ballplayers: “Cap” Anson, who was tossed out of the University of Iowa after one semester, refused to take the field against Black players. While I highly doubt that Anson’s racist attitude led by itself to professional baseball enshrining the color barrier, the fact that one of the greatest players of the time felt there was no risk in expressing his hatred tells us everything we need to know.

Decades later, in what has to be the most racism contained within a single baseball transaction, Washington sent Jake Powell to New York for Ben Chapman. Of the two, Chapman (who was an open antisemite) has justly gone down in baseball history as an avatar for the gutter racism that white ballplayers and managers deployed against Jackie Robinson, but Powell (who was also an open antisemite) was no slouch in this department. Not only did he once purposefully break Hank Greenberg’s wrist for the sin of being Jewish, but he claimed that he stayed in the shape in the offseason by beating Black people with the nightstick he carried as, you guessed it, a Dayton cop.

You may or may not have seen this coming, but Powell had never actually been a cop.⁷ Which means that Team Stolen Valor is the rare case of history getting the farce right the first time, and repeating itself anyway.

You could argue that being openly racist to your opponents is different from Paul Skenes pretending he’s in the seventh branch of the United States Armed Services.⁸ I wouldn’t disagree with you, but I’d also point out that when many of those teams are from Latin American countries the US has invaded, occupied, bombed, and are currently choking to death, maybe seeing Bryce Harper and his ozonated blood play soldier is a difference more in degree than in nature.

The point here is that white ballplayers have always been the kind of people who get a little too het up about how other people behave themselves in public, especially if those other people happen to look a different way, speak a different language, or come from a different place.

There was supposed to be a bit here about how the future looks just as bleak from where I’m sitting, because spending time with high school baseball players showed me that no one involved in the process—not the coaches, not the parents, and not the kids themselves—is remotely interested in improving that situation, but I’ve already hit 2,000 words and I would really like to wrap up what I have to say on this subject.

So:

Can You Demand Better?

Here’s the real question: do you want to? I ask in complete seriousness.

More seriousness, in fact, than I suspect most of you will devote to thinking of an answer. Not only because this is a newsletter piece that embodies no obligation on you to respond, but because the past few years have taught me that no one benefits more from the unnervingly-low expectations of the USian public than the same ownership class so many of them profess to detest.

See, I remember the spring of 2020, when baseball-starved USians pretended they were going to become fans of the KBO League or CPBL, who had the advantage of playing in countries that took a deadly pandemic semi-seriously.

More to the point, I remember the collective sigh of relief MLB fans breathed when they realized Rob Manfred and the Thirty Tyrants had found a way to put a few thousand people at medical risk, at their absolute minimum, so that they didn’t have to learn any new players’ names or pick up some Hangul.

Likewise, I notice a smaller version of this bellyaching every year, when the center of baseball temporarily shifts to the Caribbean winter leagues in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, and USian fans once again see what they could be having . . . and then spring training starts, and we all settle in for another long season where the most exciting thing is a bunch of dudes singing, uh, a male-voiced cover of a song originated by a female vocalist. How incredibly non-toxic of them.

I like to harp on that because it serves as a perfect microcosm for why MLB is so invincibly boring: it’d be one thing if we stopped cheering for guys who are just John Rocker with media training, or if fandom brain didn’t demand that each fan turn their particular coterie of antivaxxers and walking Blue Lives Matter flags into the cast of a Heated Rivalry spinoff, simply because they hang out shirtless in the locker room and occasionally hug each other.

That’s not what happens, though. Instead, the bar remains low, and while players still occasionally manage⁹ to slink underneath it, they do so with the help of a public that shows, time and time again, that we don’t actually give a damn. Fans actually got off their duffs and wrote to Kenesaw Mountain Landis—who was himself opposed to integrating baseball!—to demand people like Powell and Chapman be punished.

Now, the best we can hope for is some mean dunks on social media, and maybe, if the city is liberal enough, that fans coordinate enough to all turn their backs when Interchangeable Homophobe Pitcher #88 takes the mound.

Unless he’s really, really good. Or it’s a close game. Or it’s the playoffs. Then you have to watch, right?

Baseball fans (and I can’t believe I’m saying this, given how I usually feel about us as a collective) deserve better. Well, some of us deserve better.

At least, we should deserve better, and we will deserve better, when we start turning our collective back on the Soylent-ass baseball this country has always forced its public to endure.