Yeah, It Happened.

Barry's even with the Babe, and the A's are the ones that dealt it. (Yes, this is a baseball-related post. Hey, where are you going?) And apparently some people are kind of angry about it! Why? Well, go read this book. Are you back? Okay.

I have no pretensions that I'm going to be adding anything substantive to the discussion here, but I maybe want to make a case for why people of all kinds, even baseball-haters (you know who you are) should care about this. Sports are the most racially-integrated national institution we possess, but that integration doesn't come easy. Sars points out, in her essay on the Bonds kerfluffle, that the way people talk and feel about baseball is often related to how they talk and feel about America.

To me, that means race comes into it in a big way, even though everyone wants to pretend that it doesn't. That, they can, without cognitive dissonance, love the brothers Hernández, defectors who throw a ball really fast, but as for other, slower-throwing immigrants? Not so much with the love. And while everyone agrees Pierzynski needs anger management lessons, they also agree that Milton Bradley needs them more. (How dare he disrespect Jeff Kent?) And most of all, while everybody loves Ken Griffey Jr.--so respectful, so talented, so much potential to break records, yet so injury-prone and therefore so safely unlikely to ever play a full season--everybody feels just fine, gleefully fine, about hating Barry. But it's all about sportsmanship! Barry doesn't run out flies! Barry doesn't properly respect the past! Barry wears padding so a ball thrown at 90 miles an hour won't hit his elbow quite as hard! Barry has a weirdly high voice and a leather recliner in front of his locker!

Truth is, I don't like him either, and at this point I don't know if it's because he's really a jerk or because I've been conditioned into it. But I know that none of the things I mentioned above really gets at what the problem is for most people. Sure, the reluctance to "hustle" to first is annoying, when it's part of his million-dollar job description, but there's a little bit more cultural depth to the accusation that a black man is acting lazy. Barry, right now, is in a dangerous place: he is black, and he is getting something that we, the beer-guzzling sports fan public have decided that he doesn't "deserve." This gives people a chance to talk angrily about how America isn't like that--we earn our privilege and our place in the record books with our own bootstraps! Any similarity to barely suppressed white outrage about affirmative action, welfare reforms, or slavery reparations is, of course, surely just a coincidence.