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.”

You Can Run. You Can Jump. But, Can You Win?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

Last week as we began our worship series on the gospel message to be found in movies about the Olympics we looked at the movie Miracle, about the 1980 US hockey team who won gold. To help them prepare for that, their coach told them they were going to work harder than they had ever worked before, and wanted to know that they were actually going to be dedicated enough to actually get it done? That is often the difference between success and failure not just in sports, but in most aspects of life. How much are you willing to put into it? Are you willing to put in everything you have, and even more, or do you want to just do enough to get by? And more importantly in our faith lives, what are we willing to do? Paul really asks the Corinthian community, are you putting everything you have in to win the race of faith, or is your desire and wants somewhere else?

And so today we look at the movie Race, which is about Jesse Owens who is arguably one of, if not the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, having won 4 gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and I hope that didn’t ruin the surprise for anyone. There is so much we could talk about this film including that the movie’s title has sort of a double meaning to it, not only being about the races that Owens won as a track star, but also about the realities of being a black man in America and in Hitler’s Olympic games. But today we are going to focus on the fact no one gets to the Olympics by just talent alone. Talent will get you only so far on its own, but it takes more than just talent to be your best and especially the best in the world. And so Owens, whose family moved to Ohio from Alabama when he was a boy, goes to Ohio State University to run on their track team, at a time in which their football team was still another 7 years away from being integrated. And when he gets there, his coach, Larry Snyder, wonders what he has. Take a look…

Rich White Men Controlling Things

Steve Sarkisian has just recently been named the new head football coach at the University of Texas. He signed a 6-year contract starting at $5.2 million dollars and escalating by $200,000 each year for a total of $34.2 million. In his first interview, he was asked about what will happen with the Texas fight song "The Eyes of Texas," and his answer was very telling.

But, in case you are not aware, last year as the country was starting some sort of racial reckoning, athletes, and others, at Texas were doing the same. They were seeking to have buildings renamed after people who weren't racists and/or slaved holders. They also pointed out the racist background of the "Eyes of Texas," including that it came from minstrel shows with white students dressed in blackface to sing it.

And so many on the football team, who had the highest profile, objected to this history and the fact that they were forced to sing it after each home game. This past season many on the team refused to stay and sing it, and there were also many musicians in the band who said they would not play it. The administration’s answer was to play it over the loudspeakers, without the band present, and force the football team to stay out.

Now the answer given by the administration, think white men, was that the boosters, think rich white men, didn't have a problem with it and wanted it to continue. And so it was going to continue, whether the athletes liked it or not. In other words, rich white men were telling unpaid black men what to do, and that they had no say and should just be happy they get to play for Texas. Plus the school had put up a statue of the first black letterman for the university, so shouldn't that be enough? (And his name is Julius Whittier, and he earned that letter in 1970. Not 1950 or even 1960, but 1970!)

Now Sarkisian could have done a lot of things. The smartest probably would have been to say that he knows there are lots of feelings around the issue, and he was going to talk with his players, and the administration, before he said anything. Instead, he said the boosters, the rich white men paying his salary, wanted it played, and so he, a rich white man, was going to tell his players, those unpaid, largely black athletes, that he doesn't care about them or their feelings about a song with racist connotations and history because they have no power and they were going to "proudly" sing it.

I really hope that the athletes and the band and other students continue to tell the administration and the boosters that just because you are rich and white doesn't mean you get to do what you want anymore. That's the way the world has worked, but that time is coming to an end, and it's all of these little battles, and the big ones, that will make a difference. 

Sloth Versus Mourning

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was John 11:17-27, 32-44:

Pulitzer Prize winning play write Wendy Wasserstein wrote a tongue-in-cheek account of a self-help book that could sweep the nation entitled Sloth: And How to Get It. It promoted sloth as being achievable in just five easy steps, and even used sloth as an acronym. The S is for sit instead of stand, L is for let yourself go, O is for open your mouth and let anything you like enter, T is for toil no more, and H is happiness is within me, I don’t have to work at it. Now the problem with a self-help book promoting sloth is multifold. The first is that anyone who wants to promote such an idea is probably too lazy to actually write it, and the second is that those who want to become more slothful are too lazy to go get the book and those who would actually leave their couches to purchase it are too self-actualized to ever truly become slothful, and thus a book on how to become a sloth is probably destined never to be written. And perhaps that’s all for the best since sloth is one of the deadly sins, which is why we are looking at it today in comparison to what we find in the beatitudes and that is Jesus’ statement that those who mourn are blessed.

From the earliest times that the seven deadly sins were being compiled and pronounced, they have been compared against the virtues that the church thought we should be pursuing, but the list of comparative virtues has changed around depending upon who was doing the expounding. And so as I was trying to put together my list of comparing and contrasting the beatitudes and these sins, which I was not the first to do, I had to figure which was going to go with which, and the hardest one was for those who mourn. I decided to put sloth together with mourning because in some sense they can be very similar, or at least the behaviors can be similar. That is people who are mourning are often depressed and don’t want to do anything, which can be seen as sloth, and yet it’s not, besides for the fact that Jesus tells us that those who mourn are actually blessed. Do you feel blessed when you mourn?