Dear Bryce,
A few weeks ago when I was at a sports bar, watching your team crush my team, my friend Jon said to me, “But have you ever met anyone named Bryce who isn’t a d-bag?”
This aroused chuckles of agreement from some others at the bar.
When game time comes, you’ll always be our enemy. With that said, I have this feeling that you’re only a few tweets and interviews shy of being our hero. But until then, I’m going to be sitting there chuckling along with my barstool neighbors.
When folks criticize you for “not respecting” the game, I’m on your side. Baseball should be fun. Y’all play a game for a living, after all (Syndergaard made this point all too casually when he and Yo rode horses into Spring Training earlier this year, and I freaking loved it.)
As a fan, I love stadiums where the crowd dresses up, stands up, dances, yells and makes noise. I expect that the same level of enthusiasm from the players would only make it more fun for us.
“Make baseball fun again”, however, doesn’t do it for me.
Because when you tout that you’re going to “make baseball fun again”, who exactly is going to be having that fun? When you’re “on a mission to change baseball forever”, who are you changing it for?
The movement to progress baseball past its tired “unwritten rules” seems a bit divided. On one side, there’s you — the “new class” — and your kiss-blowing, flashy bats, emoji stickers, Donald Trump parody merch and pomade.
On the other side, there’s veteran players who also face a similar backlash — Jose Bautista, in particular, for flipping his bat after hitting a game-tying 3-run homerun during the 2015 ALDS. In his defense, Bautista described the extremely animated culture of baseball in the Dominican Republic and how, when the majority of foreign MLB players are now Dominican, that culture is going to cross over. And it’s going to breach some of those “unwritten rules” from time to time.
“How can you expect everybody to be exactly the same? Act exactly the same?” Bautista said. “More importantly, why would you want them to?”
My wish is that when people as influential as you stand up to challenge age-old conventions, it’ll be about more than personal fashion. I hope that it will send a wider message of breaking down the cultural barriers that are inhibiting Americans from embracing diversity and demanding social justice.
You are, after all, the face of an American pastime that, more and more every day, must survive against a changing social and political climate. As you said yourself, “it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now.” These “young guys” that you speak of are hailing heavily from Latin America, comprising nearly 30% of active players. Yet they’re playing a game that somehow hasn’t seen the necessity of employing Spanish interpreters until this year.
When you decide to make a parody out of the campaign slogan of a Presidential candidate vehemently criticized as racist against Mexican, Muslim, and Black people, what kind of message are you trying to send? Is this an opportunity to challenge a dangerous xenophobic sentiment that is spreading rampantly across America, or are you primarily raising awareness that you’d like to put fun decals on your baseball bat without criticism?
(BTW, one of your “young guys”, Matt Harvey, has made a statement against said candidate, albeit in the most passive way possible.)
Now you’re wearing a tee shirt supporting DC’s move for statehood. I want to know what the fight for enfranchisement in a historically majority-black city means to you, when you are playing on a stadium that was over 95% funded by taxpayers (not including the additional funds that went into rehabilitating the Navy Yard Metro stop), yet displaced a large chunk of its local residents. I want you to take a good look at the crowd cheering for you at Nationals Park and tell me just how accurately you think your fan base represents the District (WaPo estimates that 85% of Nationals fans come in from Virginia and Maryland).
What it comes down to, Bryce, is that when you “make baseball fun again” — when you feel that you’ve brought major league baseball to a place where players are able to freely express themselves on the field through fashion and animated gestures and what have you— what exactly is it that you’re going to express?
As you covet basketball and football for attracting all of the kids today, have you wondered if that might have anything to do with how the most high-profile voices in baseball have mostly remained silent (exception: Huston Street) following recent events that will potentially plague the youth of our nation for years to come?
At last night’s All-Star Game, a member of the Tenors held up a sign that said “All Lives Matter” as they sang the Canadian National Anthem, which we soon learned was altered to also include the phrase that has mostly been dismissive of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
No wonder baseball is “tired”.
I turn to you, Bryce, because you’re out there rallying for freedom of expression, and America’s eyes and ears are on you. You’ve got the potential to make your message about so much more. Are you going to do it?
Sincerely,
A Mets fan
