Rooting for Jerks Without Being One

Baseball fandom is inherently irrational.

Why are you a fan of any team? Is it because you carefully evaluated all the teams for moral correctness before determining which one has a code closest to your own values? (Good luck with that: “Hmm, this team wants to make money while this other team is trying to… oh wait, they’re all just trying to make money.”) Or is it because you happened to be born near a team, or because your mom was born near a team, or because seven-year-old you thought a particular color combination looked cool?

Let’s assume logic and rationality didn’t have much to do with it. I should know, I rooted for Barry Bonds (more on that later).

Something else: Baseball is a diversion. Work is stressful, family is stressful. When you sit down to watch a game, you can put worries aside. The problems in baseball are — or should be — confined to the game. You might get mad about seeing (for example) the manager leave a struggling pitcher in too long so that he can get a win, but when the game is over, the annoyance fades. Sports are a proxy for real life, with internal conflicts that entertain and distract, but ultimately don’t affect us on a deep level. Sports are entertainment, where the good guys and bad guys are merely actors, and we can walk out of the ballpark without worry.

Unless, of course, there’s a jerk on the team.

You know who I’m talking about. Maybe he’s been arrested for assault, but the charges were dropped. Still, you have trouble cheering quite so loudly when he comes to bat. Or he said something stupid to a reporter, or on Twitter. Maybe he just seems to be an unpleasant jerk on the field. Perhaps you find PEDs particularly troubling, and you groan over your team signing someone who was popped and served a suspension. Maybe he’s a good player, but when you know that he’s rude, a bigot, or possibly even a criminal, it’s hard to know how to feel about him wearing the colors of the team you love so irrationally.

This came up a couple times during the 2015 playoffs. The first time was when Chase Utley’s late slide broke up a double play and Ruben Tejada’s leg during the National League Division Series. The baseball world went wild with attacks and counterattacks. Chase Utley plays hard — too hard! It seems he’s always involved in these plays! He’s a bad sport! (The resulting backlash from Dodgers and — especially — Phillies fans at seeing their fave trashed by the media and other fans escalated this argument on Twitter to absurd heights.)

The second 2015 postseason jerk was Daniel Murphy, a career 110+ OPS hitter whose torrid postseason seemed to carry the Mets all the way to the World Series, where his bat finally cooled (and his defense unraveled). But during the NLCS, every time he hit another home run, my Twitter timeline lit up to remind everyone that way back during spring training, he decided to speak out against MLB Ambassador for Inclusion Billy Bean, who is gay:

I disagree with his lifestyle,” Murphy said. “I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect. Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100 percent.”

I don’t know about you and the people you know (on the internet or in person), but this is definitely not a winning argument with the people I follow on Twitter — including Mets fans. But when their team was winning because of Murphy’s heroics on the field, it was hard for them to scorn him. When he hit six home runs in six games in October, even the most principled Mets fan had trouble wishing he wasn’t on the team.

Indeed, one of my Twitter people — a Mets fan, and someone who does not agree with his viewpoint on homosexuality — said that while Murphy’s words are despicable, his ideas are probably shared by a lot of baseball players, who tend toward the conservative politically. Why, she asked, do we condemn him, when there’s no doubt he’s not alone? (And of course he isn’t – most notably, Torii Hunter has gotten plenty of feedback for saying much the same thing. I think we can reasonably assume that others silently agree, but are wise enough to keep their mouths shut.)

The answer is that words matter. Actions matter. Actively voicing abhorrent ideas is worse than merely thinking them. The words people say and the actions people take are what shapes our society. As long as people continue to use hurtful language and engage in hurtful behavior (i.e., always) we’re going to be conflicted over how to handle it. And sports fans will continue struggle with how to root for someone they might not personally like.

How do we do it?

First, don’t deny or brush aside the facts. If a player decides to verbally harass a beat writer and call him vile names, that’s a jerk move. A player choking a teammate in the middle of a game? Jerk move. Making an excuse for it makes you look like the jerk. It doesn’t matter what their jobs are. They’re still people living in a society, where we can expect to go to work and do our jobs without someone accosting us with insults or physical attacks. Before you decide to defend a player who has done something naughty, consider whether you would like to experience that sort of behavior in your place of work.

Oh, and telling me that I don’t understand what makes baseball exempt from the expectation that we not be verbally or physically attacked at work because I “never played the game?” Jerk move. (Seriously, don’t do it.)

Dusty Baker recently learned the hard way that praising Aroldis Chapman, who is being investigated for alleged domestic violence, as a “a heck of a guy” is similarly not a great move. His further ramblings about we don’t know what’s going on and that a friend of his is being abused by his female partner, were inexcusable. He’s correct in that we (which includes Baker, by his own admission) do not have all of the details, but leaping to the defense of someone accused of a serious crime is insensitive at the very least.

Baker added that “baseball is a microcosm of society.” It is not. Baseball is nothing like society. It is overwhelmingly male, and it is extremely wealthy. It is filled with people who are fanatically competitive. Perhaps if one spends enough time in that society, one might not realize how unusual the world of professional ballplayers is, but in the wider society — the one that includes women — domestic violence is not so easily ignored.

Second, accept that baseball is within its rights to take actions independent of the law. In light of Rockies shortstop Jose Reyes’ arrest for domestic violence, I tweeted my hopes that MLB would take the case seriously. (My subsequent suggestion that baseball do they opposite of whatever the NFL would do might appear a bit flippant, but I sincerely hope that the MLB not follow down the NFL’s reactionary, inconsistent, and opaque system of punishment.) While most people who responded to my tweet seemed to agree, I also got a couple of responses that a crime should be handled by the law and it isn’t up to baseball to punish Reyes (or anyone else who might commit a crime).

While you personally might not care about how baseball disciplines players (see the following point), please keep in mind that baseball is a business and that players are employees. If a player provides bad public relations, MLB or a team is well within its rights, as defined by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, to punish him — especially since the new domestic violence policy was agreed to by the league and the player’s association. No team should feel obligated to continue to keep running out a player whose presence is going to upset fans.

Third, accept that other fans are going to come to different conclusions. It (probably) doesn’t make them bad people. Remember the part about baseball being irrational? It’s hard to turn off our admiration for a player because he might not be a great person. It’s probable that this season, some fans are going to be faced with the dilemma of rooting for a player they might not want to be friends with. Rockies fans will cheer for Jose Reyes, and Reds or Dodgers or Mystery Team fans will be rooting for Aroldis Chapman. They will have to decide: do I want to see this guy baffle opposing hitters with a 101 mph fastball wearing the colors that I love, or do I want him to fail? Can I watch this without cringing? Can I enjoy this stupendous athletic achievement?

I consider myself to be a bit of an expert on this topic. When I told my sister what I was writing about, she said “you know a lot about rooting for jerks, since you love Barry Bonds.” She’s not wrong. Rather than writing all the reasons I love Barry Bonds, I’d rather just suggest that you read this piece by Grant Brisbee and say that like Grant, I am a lifelong Giants fan and he and I are close in age. Barry Bonds was clearly a jerk in his playing days, and not a good person. And it’s not that I don’t care. I do care; I wish he hadn’t been a jerk, and I especially wish that people would care more about his track record on domestic violence than the PED use, which I don’t really care about and is much less important in the scheme of things. But as a fan — as an irrational human who can’t turn off my adolescent memories of years of cheering for the greatest hitter of my lifetime, I still think he’s the best.

Other people, pretty clearly, disagree with me. Some of them are probably already in the comments section below. That’s okay. It’s allowed. They aren’t bad people, and they aren’t even wrong. (Unless they think that Barry Bonds is not the all time home run king, which is clearly correct because numbers prove it. But even not being able to count probably doesn’t make them bad people.)

But being angry at other fans, or fans of other teams, for not coming to the same conclusion when determining how to react to a player’s misdeeds is a waste of time. The intersection of the irrationality of sports fandom and the seriousness of crime or unfortunate moral sentiment is always going to result in a personal calculation that is hard to judge fairly and entirely without hypocrisy.

Baseball is a proxy for real world conflicts, but the players we watch are not a proxy for reality – they are real people, with real faults. But while a player might be a jerk, that’s not an excuse for fans to follow in his footsteps.