Field Day for Demonizing
By David Damiani
The 1980s Baseball Hall of Shame book series recounts the remarkable tale of Detroit Tigers first baseman Rudy York’s 1943 season. York, who had slumped late in 1942, inexplicably became the target of seemingly unprecedented abuse from hometown fans. After the unseemly booing finally stopped in the season’s second half, York went on a rampage at the plate, hitting 17 home runs in August and ultimately leading the league in homers while posting superb other final offensive stats. The most astonishing element of this story is not the schizophrenic nature of York’s season but what brought about his revival. Detroit fans ceased their assault on York and moved squarely into his corner after being admonished in both the local and national sports press.
Given how many modern sportswriters act as picadors in working up a rage in both themselves and fans over the athletes they choose to demonize, it’s hard to imagine a scenario like the valiant defense of York happening today. (Though the same sportswriters often stop at nothing to condescend to or castigate fans, in the York situation all accounts suggest the fans in question deserved it, and there was no attempt to classify the behavior of a few thousand people in Detroit as a national crisis.) The hysterical and repetitive coverage of players who the sports press chooses not to like is yet another of its many disservices to its audience.
A recent blog post from FOX Sports commentator Rob Dibble represents a commendable stand against the grain of this trend. Reflecting on the largely negative coverage Barry Bonds typically receives, Dibble implores his peers and the fans who adhere to their views to cease the hatefulness that has often dominated the conversation about Bonds’ career and personality and judge his performance on the merits.
Bonds may not be the world’s most likeable character if we’re to believe mountains of press accounts of his surly behavior and quotes—and I say that as someone with awed respect for his selectivity at the plate and what I’d wager is more than average skepticism about steroid hysteria and the mainstream sports media’s accuracy—but he’s a good example of the hateful press trends to which Dibble refers. Before steroid talk became such a dominant part of baseball discussion, Bonds already received plenty of negative press and saw his accomplishments downplayed largely because the press didn’t like his standoffish attitude—the same reason players like Eddie Murray, Frank Thomas, and Kevin McReynolds have been demonized, if not to the same degree. And if you repeat the line that someone is a jerk often enough, it will gain public acknowledgement even if an audience has no direct experience with which to verify it.
Coverage of Bonds’ career does not focus intelligently on the merits of his career (and even assuming that steroids may have enhanced the latter stages of it, or that they have the extreme powers many sportswriters ascribe to them, he was already well-established as one of the generation’s greats). It simply boils down to a lot of writers spending several hundred words to explain how very much they do not like Bonds. It’s an easy column that allows the writer to repeat a line that has widespread acceptance as fact and to feel morally superior to the athlete.
And that sense of moral superiority drives many of the other individual athlete demonizations in recent memory. While perusing the almost always hilarious blog Deadspin last week, I ran across an entry ridiculing John Rocker for his (apparently apocryphal) personal ad on match.com. Why Rocker is still enough of a celebrity to merit this coverage more than six years after his infamous comments on foreigners and New Yorkers in Sports Illustrated (after which his career almost immediately went in the toilet) is a fine illustration of how these kinds of campaigns against athletes become self-perpetuating.
Rocker’s comments complaining about the volume of foreigners in New York and the characters he expected to encounter on the train to Shea Stadium were not race specific beyond one complaint about Japanese immigrants’ driving skills; he also uttered a slur against homosexuals. For his remarks, he was characterized as a xenophobe and anti-gay. Those conclusions were at least understandable.
What’s confusing is that Rocker was also ultimately classified as a racist, fascist, and sexist (among other perfidies), with many of his critics assuming these other “isms” into existence. (Rocker did make a comment that teammate Randall Simon classified as a racial slur, but which Rocker claimed was a term of endearment. However much Rocker may lack credibility, a man at least deserves a fair trial before a unanimous conclusion that he’s a racist.) The force of such charges sets their repetition into a perpetually motive cycle; justifiable criticisms sometimes spawn greater hysteria and lead to more extreme, possibly baseless, accusations.
Sportswriters still dance on the grave of Rocker’s career today, and some will still casually equate him (in Ward Churchillian fashion) to Adolf Eichmann and lynch mobs, for the same reason Bonds’ status as an unpleasant person and a cheater is widely accepted as fact: slamming such individuals makes sportswriters come off as morally superior, free to pontificate to the masses and to the athletes for whom they often evince similar contempt. Cracks about Bonds, Rocker, and any of sports’ stock villains not only make for easy columns but also provide an opportunity for members of the press to verbally dunk in the face of an athlete, exuding the smug vibe of “I showed him.”
Which is not to discount the possibility that Bonds is a jerk and a fraud or that Rocker is biased against just about everybody. And yes, I’ve similarly concluded in this space that Jason Giambi was the human embodiment of Homer Simpson when the latter sold his soul for a doughnut. But it’s always wiser not to indict someone’s character based on a few remarks or idle speculation—a truism that rarely restrains members of the sports media.
David Damiani is a CPA with Witt Mares, PLC, in Newport News, Virginia. He is the Friday sports columnist for The American Enterprise Online.
