The Arizona Diamondbacks entered Wednesday night’s game at Chase Field with a record of 76-81, all but the OED definition of mediocre and a dozen games adrift of the first-place Dodgers in the NL West. They are a middling ball club riding out the string in a sport where nearly all of the 2,430 games played in a season will be quickly forgotten, even by the players on the field. Compelling theater this was not.
Perhaps it’s that late-season ennui that prompted the local broadcasting team of Bob Brenly and Steve Berthiaume to spend a full two minutes emptying their chambers when cameras trained on a group of women from the Arizona State chapter of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority snapping selfies during the middle of the fourth inning.
“Do you have to make faces when you take selfies?” groused Brenly, a 61-year-old man. “That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today!”
Added Berthiaume: “Every girl in the picture is locked onto her phone. Every single one is dialed in. Welcome to parenting in 2015.”
And so forth. The cringeworthy exchange persisted even after Arizona’s David Peralta led off the bottom of the fourth with a base hit, the horse apparently not dead enough.
“Take a selfie with the hot dog, selfie with the churro, selfie just of the selfie!” Brenly quipped. “Here’s my first bite of the churro, here’s my second bite of the churro.”
Riffed Berthiaume: “Can we do an intervention? How about if we send Baxter (the Diamondbacks’ mascot) out there and he just collects all the phones. You’re not getting them back till the end of the game.”
On one hand baseball broadcasts, first on radio and later on TV, have long depended on light-hearted commentary of ballpark scenery to fill the many pockets of downtime during the average game. Yet something about Wednesday’s paternalistic rant felt creepy and excessive beneath its bouncy veneer.
From a fan standpoint, the failure to hang on every pitch of meeting between two also-ran clubs that have been out of playoff contention for weeks is hardly a mortal sin. But even if Wednesday’s outcome hadn’t been utterly devoid of consequence, it’s hard to imagine the commentary team targeting a gaggle of rowdy finance bros inhaling $12 beers while ignoring the action on the field. Because that never happens.
Is it Ian Cohen asking Genie Bouchard to “give us a twirl” or Stephen A Smith blaming a goal at the Women’s World Cup on the German players “not wanting to mess up their hair”? Surely not. But even the most seemingly innocuous episodes of everyday sexism reinforce the idea of sports as a boys’ club, an outdated notion that serves no one. Certainly not a traditional sport whose problems attracting younger, more progressively minded fans are as thoroughly documented as the Mitchell Report. The median age of last year’s World Series viewer was 55.6 according to Horizon Media, up from 49.9 only five years ago. That’s an alarming trend for baseball’s power brokers even as revenues and franchise valuations soar.
Worse, these patterns embolden misogynists, like the third-rate aggregator who demeaned Wednesday’s offenders as “future world leaders” who got the dressing-down they deserved.
Once Fox Sports realized that grown men mocking young women for enjoying themselves might not be a good look, the network ran damage control by offering the women of Alpha Chi Omega tickets to Thursday’s game. Rather than endure a second Diamondbacks game in two nights, the sorority asked the team to give the tickets to families at A New Leaf, a local non-profit that offers homeless and domestic violence services, thus leveraging their unsolicited momentary fame to spotlight a worthy cause. Well played.
Perhaps the NFL with its bulletproof popularity can afford to be tone-deaf when it comes to alienating the women that studies indicate account for 45% of football fans. But when it comes how it treats the paying customers who turned out for a meaningless game during the dying days of September, baseball might be wise to take a look in the mirror.
