Sarcasm is sooooooo hard to detect

Positively impossible

Cards on the table: I like Brandon Belt.

You remember Brandon Belt, right? Y’know, he did a good job in commercials, played first base, was named Brandon? Seem somewhat familiar? Ring a bell? Cool, glad you remember now.

We’re going to talk about Brandon Belt, but we’re not really going to talk about Brandon Belt. This has been the case so often with Belt, where a discussion about him becomes a discussion about all the things he isn’t, the homers he doesn’t hit, the balls an inch high he doesn’t chase that are then called strikes anyway. The premise of the anti-Belt crowd was always, “He’d be good if he was just someone else,” ignoring both that his skills were valuable and good, and also that he was never going to be someone else. And like so many of those discussions, our subject today will again be related to Brandon Belt but not actually Brandon Belt.

But before we don’t talk about Brandon Belt, let’s talk about Brandon Belt.

Belt was a good, sometimes excellent, player for the Giants for more than a decade. He didn’t have a good year in 2022, and he was hurt a lot, so the Giants let him go. He ended up in Toronto, where he’s currently hitting .263/.375/.429, mostly as a DH, though he has played 17 games at first base. He’s been a good hitter, but not a league leader; among American League DHs with at least 100 PAs, Belt is 6th in wRC+ at 130, 40 points behind the league leader, Shohei Ohtani and 38 points behind second place Yordan Alvarez. He’s also missed some time with nagging injuries, so he hasn’t been on the field as much as the 5 guys in front of him on that wRC+ list.

Belt is also in second place in AL All-Star voting at DH, behind only Ohtani. This isn’t because everyone thinks he deserves it; it’s mostly because Blue Jays fans have been packing the ballot boxes — the metaphorical online ballot boxes, I guess — to get all of their guys elected.

So Belt was asked about those results, and he gave the most Brandon Belt response possible, which some large baseball-related Twitter accounts misunderstood:

Belt is not unhappy. Belt is obviously not unhappy. He was making an offhand sarcastic comment about something he doesn’t really care about. He’s not going to make the All-Star team, and he knows it, and he was making a joke.

There is another interpretation, promoted by morons.

He said it was rigged, so he must think it was rigged! He said he should have the most votes, so he must think that! And he said he was a better hitter than SHOHEI OHTANI! How could he think that? He’s crazy! I’m gonna get on social media and tell everyone that he’s crazy! Then people will see that I, a not-crazy person, have good and smart opinions!

This is a lack of reading comprehension, which is a plague. As a huge fucking nerd, I feel like I can say this: too many people are huge fucking nerds. They have no feel for any meaning beyond the most surface-level basic interpretation of anything. Someone says a thing, that’s what they think, end of story. There is no more thought given, no depth uncovered. You have Point A. You have Point B. Why would you need anything else?

This is the same philosophy that turns nutrition into “Just count calories in and calories out,” despite all the evidence that that doesn’t work. This is the same philosophy that has led to every big-budget movie being two buff superheroes punching each other. This is the same philosophy that has led to the guys crowing about how ChatGPT will lead to a revolution in writing, because all they can see is surface-level content and they have no interest in or understanding of the purpose beyond it.

They think that there has to be a simple answer that they can see, because they’ve spent their lives being told they’re smart and good for seeing the answers. This is a certain Type Of Guy — and oh man, can I not tell you how close I was and occasionally am to being one of them — who is convinced of the following:

1. I am smart

2. I see an Answer

3. Because I am smart, the Answer I see is the right answer.

When you have those things, when you are convinced of your own genius and superiority, that becomes part of your identity. It becomes unthinkable that you would have to work harder to get something more out. It is borderline offensive that there is someone who can see something you can’t, and so that person must be a pretentious asshole. It is simply not the way of the world that you could miss this thing, so therefore there must be no thing to miss. This does not happen to you. This happens to your lessers.

If it seems like I’m reaching here, ask yourself, how could a literate person possibly miss that Belt was joking? You don’t have to know anything about Brandon Belt for this; you literally just have to have had a human conversation with a person where you listened to them speak.

To me, the best explanation is that a bunch of STEM nerds who always thought English was bullshit and only read science fiction books for the cool space battles just couldn’t handle regular words. Then some groupthink set in, and at that point, once a group of people started saying Belt was serious, the next group didn’t do the work themselves of figuring out what they thought and went with it. Then a narrative took hold, certainly not among everyone, but among way too large a percentage of people who saw the quote, and suddenly Belt was the idiot who didn’t know that Shohei Ohtani is very good at baseball.

Also, these people are getting promoted more because they’re paying for promotion because they think that will give them the social currency they’ve never had. As someone who has also lived through long stretches of my life sans social currency, take it from me: nope! No one cares! You’re stuck with your own stupid thoughts forever, suckers!

Brandon Belt said a joke. Most people got it. But there was a large — like, weirdly large — cohort who just refused to understand. This is evidence of a few things: that no matter how obviously stupid a position, there will always be someone who takes and defends it; that just because you hear voices doesn’t mean you should take them seriously; that we now have reason number 318,460,908 that New Twitter is a bigger garbage pile than Old Twitter; and that people can get mad about anything for any reason.

You probably already knew most of that. It used to be striking to see ignorance so blatantly on display. Now it’s pretty normal. That’s probably not a good sign.