Two unlikely baseball controversies have disrupted the rapture of spring, and I find myself toggling back and forth between grumpiness and enlightenment.
In other words, “Get off my lawn!” — but first, put down some biodegradable fertilizer so I can grow my organic quinoa.
The first issue on the table is Adam LaRoche and his omnipresent 14-year-old son, Drake, who apparently was being all but home-schooled in the Chicago White Sox clubhouse. White Sox vice president Ken Williams suggested that maybe Drake should spend a little less time at the ballyard, and all hell broke loose.
LaRoche up and quit, forfeiting a $13 million contract — but not before his teammates rose to his defense in what has been portrayed as a fiery team meeting. Ace pitcher Chris Sale was particularly worked up, demanding that Williams get out, and stay out, of the White Sox clubhouse, then calling him a liar to reporters.
The result is the liveliest national debate on the intersection of parenthood and sports since the Houston Oilers threatened to discipline offensive tackle David Williams for missing a game in order to attend the birth of his child back in 1993.
Though I greatly admire LaRoche’s devotion to his son, I place myself firmly on Team Williams, at least theoretically. I mean, it’s hard to argue with this statement by Williams: “We all think his kid is a great young man. I just felt it should not be every day, that’s all. You tell me, where in this country can you bring your child to work every day?”
The problem, however, is that more details have emerged that make this far less cut-and-dried than it first appeared. For instance, LaRoche says he signed with the White Sox in 2015 only after they agreed to this very arrangement. And now LaRoche says that Williams, rather than making the reasonable request to scale back Drake’s clubhouse time, told him he couldn’t come at all.
The whole thing was clumsily handled by Williams, muting his thoroughly defensible point that it’s not conducive to team-building for LaRoche to have his kid around 24/7. I’ve been in baseball clubhouses for three decades, and it’s always heartwarming to see players interacting with their children. I used to love watching Jamie Moyer hit grounders and throw BP to his sons in the early afternoon before games, and Felix Hernandez’s son is a delightful occasional presence in the Mariners’ clubhouse, as are other players’ kids.
But I’ve never seen someone have his child around as extensively as LaRoche, and I could see where it might grate on some players, even if they don’t want to admit it publicly. It seems like reasonable men should have been able to work out a compromise that would have kept the White Sox from erupting into open warfare.
The next issue is also about kids and culture, in a roundabout way. I’m speaking about the grumpiest of old men, Goose Gossage, who this week pretty much threw the entire generation of modern ballplayers under the team bus while fuming about how much better things were in his day.
Now, I’m a big fan of Gossage the pitcher, who was the most intimidating closer I’ve ever seen. I actually had a chance to cover him during his waning days with the Giants — one of seven teams he played for in his final seven years — and he was a blast to interview.
But I’m here to say Gossage gets a big, fat goose-egg on this rant. And I’ll leave out the part where he ripped the front-office “nerds” who are turning baseball into a “joke,” castigated the rule changes regarding home-plate collisions and slides into second base, and lambasted instant replay — even though he was off-base on all those fronts.
The part that really rubbed me wrong was Gossage’s all-too-familiar criticism of today’s players for their celebrations and general flamboyance.
“I can’t stand to watch this game, the way it’s changed and the way guys act,’’ he told ESPN 1000, one of many interviews Gossage gave last week. “If I see one more pie in somebody’s face, I’m gonna break my TV.”
He reserved his harshest diatribe for Jose Bautista’s bat flip after his decisive three-run homer in last year’s Division Series.
“Bautista is a f—ing disgrace to the game,’’ Gossage told ESPN. “He’s embarrassing to all the Latin players, whoever played before him. Throwing his bat and acting like a fool, like all those guys in Toronto. (Yoenis) Cespedes, same thing.”
Beyond the fact that it’s ludicrous and insulting to link Bautista, a Dominican, to every Latin player from a vast array of countries — like saying Gossage is embarrassing to all Americans — is the fact that the emotion and passion displayed by Bautista in that instance is precisely what baseball needs more of.
In case you haven’t heard, baseball is facing a silent crisis. Its fan base is slowly dying off. Kids’ interest in the sport — and also, significantly, their participation — is waning by the year. New commissioner Rob Manfred has wisely instituted a multitude of initiatives aimed at winning back the youth market. Just this week, I received a news release from the Mariners announcing their “Junior Mariners” campaign.
That’s all great. But the best way to get the youth of today to put down their soccer balls, lacrosse sticks and video games, and pick up a bat and ball, is to make the sport entertaining enough to capture their attention. And all that poetic stuff about the noble mind games between pitcher and batter isn’t going to cut it. Baseball is increasingly viewed, rightly or wrongly, as staid, hidebound and boring.
I turn the floor over to Bryce Harper, who in an interview with ESPN The Magazine hit a tape-measure home run: “Baseball’s tired. It’s a tired sport because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.
“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”
Gossage, of course, responded with some fresh shots at Harper (and Newton, naturally), but Harper is unequivocally correct. Ignoring the fact that every baseball generation thinks the succeeding one is less committed and professional than them, Gossage overlooked another cogent fact. Some of baseball’s greatest showman played his era — or has he forgotten Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Rickey Henderson, Bill Lee and others. For goodness sake, Gossage was Yankee teammates with Reggie Jackson, and no one embellished a home run like Reggie.
And we loved him. As long as the celebrations don’t devolve into taunting, it’s time to put aside all those, yes, tired baseball conventions about “playing the game the right way.” The joyful, expressive way does not have to be the wrong way.
To maintain its status as a major and vibrant American sport, baseball needs to win back the kids. Not all of them get to live in a clubhouse.
