A normal baseball game in a normal year is noisy. There are tens of thousands of fans, chattering away, and cheering, and clapping when the scoreboard tells them to. The stadium’s sound system is playing ads or songs, or encouraging fans to make noise by making noise itself. You’ll hear chants and vendors, gasps and applause. It’s a regular, standard, background part of watching a baseball game.
This year, there is none of that. Cardboard cutouts generally keep to themselves, it turns out, and so every noise inside the stadium is extremely audible. Like umpires calling pitches, for example. Or an outfielder yelling out, “I got it I got it I got it!”
Or, uh, this:
In that situation, from Monday night, Tyler Anderson was mad at himself because he had had a bad inning. We know he was mad because he very audibly yelled “Fuck!” as he walked off the mound, caught with exceptional clarity by the microphones on the field and served up to us, the TV viewing public.
Friends, this rules.
It is the simplest, stupidest, and most 2020 pleasure to hear a baseball player scream “Fuck!” after doing something bad. It used to be that the stars had to align just right to catch that kind of moment: he probably had to be at home so the crowd would be quiet, and that crowd had to be in an unnatural hush anyway, and he had to be very close to an on-field mic, and neither the announcers nor anyone on the field could actually be talking at the time, and there were about 50 other ands that you could tack on. It was common enough to see pitchers scream into their gloves as they walked off the field, but in the olden times of 2019 and earlier, we couldn’t hear them.
Now we can. And I can give you an explanation for why this is great that is all about enhancing our understanding of the game: that it’s fascinating to watch players react to struggling in all-too human ways, that often their anger and frustration is hidden behind banal postgame quotes and seeing them in the heat of the moment is an entirely different animal, that it helps us connect to them to see them react like we all want to when we screw up something in our lives.
But none of that is why hearing players swear is great. Hearing players swear is great because you don’t think you’re gonna hear a swear and then you hear a swear! It’s not any more complicated than that. If you’re watching sports on TV, and we all know that sports go out of their way to present a family-friendly image that is the furthest thing from corrupting our nation’s impressionable youth, then you expect a swear-free 3 hours. And then guess what happens? You nailed it, someone screams out, “Fuck!” Your night is made.
Now, not all swears are good — ask Thom Brennaman — but these particular swears are very good.
There aren’t a lot of pluses to pandemic baseball compared to non-pandemic baseball, so we have to celebrate the wins that we’ve got. Baseball players have always screwed up. They’ve always screamed profanity on the field. Now we get to hear it. We might not have much, but hey, we’ve got this.