Of Sinister Slings and Dancing Peacocks

Two things.

First, generalizations are, well, general. For one thing, to the extent that I pay attention to football, I like Liverpool, who would never be mistaken for a team with an underdog mentality. I have some very good friends who are Dodger fans. Our interactions are peppered with the sort of good-natured ribbing that makes baseball fun. This isn't about them. This is about Karen and Chad and that special kind of entitled front-runner fan who feels that the world owes them a pennant. 

Second, I find meta-media critiques to be tedious. The liberal media are biased. The media are normalizing the presidential candidacy of a man whose loss of mental sharpness is becoming as obvious as is his hostility toward the norms of democracy. The media are motivated entirely by clicks and eyeballs; if it bleeds, it leads. Blah blah blah. It's become tired and predictable. So naturally, I'm going to dive right in and discuss the abysmal coverage, thus far, of the Major League Baseball playoffs, but the intent isn't to do more meta-media critique for its own sake. The intent here is to use the lousy state of postseason baseball coverage and the motivation behind it as a sort of proxy for a social critique of the sense of entitlement that it plays to.

There are two kinds of sports teams, and with them, two kinds of fan bases. There's the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Manchester United. Then there's the San Diego Padres, the Detroit Tigers, and Leeds. The former expect to win, feel entitled to pennant after pennant, championship after championship, and view the occasional failure to achieve those top prizes as an injustice, an affront to their self-importance. The rose bush has thorns. The latter see disappointment as an inevitable part of a process that maybe, just maybe, will one day lead to a sweet success. The thorn bush has roses.

For television and other mass media, the teams in the first category are more financially lucrative. Everyone loves a winner. Everyone wants to see a winner and be associated with a winner and buy merch from a winner. Of course they're going to show favoritism. The front-running teams are the main characters in the drama that is sports competition. The other teams are, at best, part of the background, the guy—to borrow my son's visual metaphor—that Jordan is dunking on in the poster on a fourteen year old boy's bedroom wall in the '90s, the cars you pass in the old video game Pole Position. At worst, the other teams are elevated to the level of the foil, the villain¹. When the action on the field doesn't conform to these archetypes, it only follows that the media won't handle it well. We get Bob Costas barely concealing his disappointment when the lowly Kansas City Royals turned a brilliant double play on the vaunted New York Yankees. We get unruly fan behavior that delayed both Dodger home games in the National League Division Series (NLDS) passed off as the actions of a few bad apples trying to ruin the jovial and chummy atmosphere that is Dodger Stadium; look everyone, Brad Pitt and Jason Bateman are in the stands. And we get a toss of a ball that was taken out of play from Padres third baseman Manny Machado to the Dodger dugout that bounced at least three times before striking the dugout screen described as a "Sinister Sling" in a Ken Rosenthal hit piece in the Athletic. Lest we think that Rosenthal was singling out Machado, he seemed to be intent on taking down the whole team.

Machado is far from the Padres’ only irritant. Fernando Tatis Jr. is a smiling, dancing peacock. Jurickson Profar is the kid who pulls the fire alarm at school and then asks, “Who, me?”

Rosenthal goes on to give himself a particularly cutesy form of plausible deniability (words, coincidentally, that he ascribed to Machado in the article) by ham handedly mentioning Machado's leadership and personal growth over the years. You can almost see him casually standing next to the fire alarm handle with his bow tie and a sly grin. "Hit piece? What hit piece? Who, me?" 

In the end, Rosenthal probably did the Padres and their fans as much good as he did the Dodgers and theirs. That second group of teams and fan bases mentioned above thrive on an underdog narrative, on an us-versus-the-world mentality. The Padres and their fans came home to San Diego for Game 3 of the NLDS ready to win, and did so (following Teoscar Hernández's grand slam) with a convincing pitching performance from their bullpen. 

During the game, Rosenthal visited the Dodger dugout for an utterly forgettable interview with Dodgers skipper Dave Roberts. I think there might have been something in there about playing 'em one day at a time, or how, the good lord willing, things will work out. No such interview took place in the Padres dugout; word is Rosenthal was persona non grata. The Fox broadcasting crew spent much of the game trying to walk back their previous vilification of the Padres, but it was a bell that couldn't be unrung. The Athletic got their clicks; Fox got their eyeballs. The damage was done, and the damage, really, was the point. The national baseball viewing public needed to be reassured of the established order—with the Dodgers as the main character and the Padres as the foil—and the favored outcome. Ken Rosenthal's hit piece was for every cheerleader who ever felt snubbed when the nerdy girl with Coke bottle glasses got selected as homecoming queen, for every Lexus driver who ever got boxed in on the freeway and was unable to pass that Kia whose driver is only doing eighty in the fast lane. The time will come when all will be made right and you'll take your rightful place on top again. Just hopefully not this year.

1. It's no coincidence that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts ascribed this very word to what he perceived as the Padres sense of identity.