Baseball Has a Problem

Major League Baseball has some significant problems, and they are of their own making. They are also solvable, although they don’t seem willing to do anything. 

Last night the team from Atlanta beat the team from Houston and won the World Series and I didn’t watch even a single pitch of the whole series. I am a huge fan, and even when the Yankees aren’t in the playoffs I still watch. But not this year, because the choice between cheating and racism was untenable for me.

So let’s start with the easiest one and that is the team from Houston whose World Series victory from 2017 is forever tainted because they were found to have cheated, and they eliminated my Yankees on the way. Although the commissioner said it wasn’t a big deal because they just won “a piece of metal.” Makes you wonder what the commissioner thinks is the most important thing in the game.

There is evidence that they were cheating in later years as well, and perhaps they still are. And I say that, not just as a disgruntled Yankee fan, but because there were no repercussions for the players for their cheating. Additionally, they have never truly apologized for what they did, and as Maya Angelou said, if you show me who you are I’m going to believe you. You don’t get your integrity back simply because you say you aren’t doing it any more. And to get to the World Series this year they had to beat the team from Boston, who were also caught cheating in winning the 2018 World Series. Sounds like there is a problem doesn’t it?

Then we move to the team from Atlanta, who originally started out in Boston and were named the Braves then, when people didn’t really think about such things. Perhaps it really was intended as an honorific, although I would doubt that, but times change. Just as a certain Washington football team and baseball team from Cleveland have decided to change their name, I think it’s time for Atlanta to do the same, and maybe, possibly, perhaps they are thinking about it. It depends on the day you ask.

But, the tomahawk chop has to go. Even though the commission has said it’s not a problem, and the team has said it’s not a problem, it’s a problem. And the fact that the team has one tribe, with whom they have significant financial deals, say it’s not a problem doesn’t mean it’s not. Because many other groups and tribes say it absolutely is a problem and they object, including other players of indigenous heritage. And the harder truth is that white people don't get to tell others something is acceptable or not.

The president of the National Congress of American Indians, Fawn Sharp, said, in response to MLB saying it’s fine, the Braves’ name, logo and the chop “are meant to depict and caricature not just one tribal community, but all Native people, and that is certainly how baseball fans and Native people everywhere interpret them.”

And as Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne civil rights activist, said, it’s not as if it is even taking a native practice and accommodating it to something else. Instead, “that’s a White person’s invention… the ‘boom-boom-boom’… the ‘woo-woo-woo’… is just drunken White people coming out of bars at closing time and has nothing to do with Indians.” It’s other people trying to pretend to be another culture or group, and doing so in a demeaning way. And it doesn’t even have history to support it as it didn’t get introduced in Atlanta until 1991.

Here is some more history. Even if they were trying to honor local indigenous persons, there are exactly zero federal recognized tribes in the state of Georgia. Zilch, nada, none. Not because there were no indigenous tribes in the area, or even that they were all wiped out through genocide, although that played a role. Instead, they were all moved to other areas of the country, particularly Oklahoma. The Trail of Tears includes tribes from this area. And so what MLB has decided to do is to thumb their nose, not just at cheating, but also at the idea that this behavior might even be considered by anyone as inconsiderate.

And so this year I didn’t watch. I know other people who also didn’t watch, and the fact that they had record low ratings says that many other people did the same. And that’s on top of the fact that the average age of MLB fans is the highest of the major sports at 57.

MLB has done everything they can to avoid dealing with their issues because they feel like they are still printing money. But, short-term gains often go against long-term success, and when you begin to lose even your most dedicated fans, it’s problematic, and perhaps even a sign that it may be too late. But, as one very wage sage once said, “Baseball has to be a great sport because the owners haven’t been able to kill it yet.”