Controversy erupted this week when some people thought a player showed up his opponents. He made some comments that rubbed folks the wrong way, and he was overly demostrative while playing the game, and he unnecessarily ran up the score in a game that was already in the bag. He had his defenders, but also there were those who called him rude or disrespectful. Overall, a dominant performance got marred by what some considered poor behavior and what others considered over-stuffiness and silly devotion to old ways of doing things.
I’m referring, of course, to Ryan Bilger’s performance on Monday’s episode of Jeopardy.
Monday marked the beginning of this year’s Tournament of Champions, where 15 former multi-day winners are invited back to play a tournament for $250,000. It’s a tougher game than usual, with more obscure clues and players who are faster on the buzzer than in a regular game. Bilger was matched up against two players, one of whom — Jason Zuffranieri — had won 19 games in a row when he was first on the show, and was considered a favorite coming into the tournament.
Bilger smoked him. He also smoked Sarah Jett Rayburn, who, like Bilger, was a four-game winner in her original run on the show. Bilger finished the Double Jeopardy round at $32,400, with Zuffranieri and Rayburn both a shade under $10,000, making it an easy win no matter what happened in Final Jeopardy.
People were mad at Ryan Bilger.
He didn’t have the right attitude, they thought. He pounded his chest after he got a clue right. He was too excited. When he got a Daily Double early in the second round, he bet big and said “I’m gonna go for the kill,” because getting it right would almost guarantee that he would win the game (he got it right).
Here are some quotes from the /r/jeopardy thread for that game, though you can find similar opinions in many places on this here Internet.
When he said “Go for the kill” or whatever, I thought that was pretty rude.
Wow I thought I was the only one who felt that way but I feel validated knowing there are others who share the feeling. I personally found him to be disrespectful, classless, and cocky to his fellow competitors, and part of me wants to root against him now, and I was a big fan of Ryan during his original run.
He acted completely classless tonight. Really unfortunate way to start the tournament.
There were comments that got deleted, some of which can be found elsewhere on the Internet, like this:
Same. Rude, showboating. Stay in your lane, know where you are. This isn’t the show for that.
I haven't been watching for too long, so I don't know these contestants as well as others. That being said, wow I didn't think I would watch someone as unlikeable as Ryan. "Going for the kill," really dude? Embarrassing way to act on national TV
There’s more, but I think you get the idea. Except, well, there was one more comment:
He broke the unwritten rules of Jeopardy!
He disrespected the game by not being sufficiently emotionless during it. He accurately represented his strategy in betting big, which was rude. He just acted like he hadn’t been there before. It was, according to his detractors, wildly disrespectful.
Which, hey, look at that, brings us to Tony La Russa.
La Russa, managing the White Sox, sharply criticized one of his own players, Yermin Mercedes, for swinging at a 3-0 pitch in the 9th inning of a blowout win and hitting a homer off of utility player Willians Astudillo. He felt that Mercedes was disrespecting the game by swinging in that situation, and he hasn’t been shy about expressing that view. The Twins threw at Mercedes the next day and La Russa basically said, yeah, he deserved that, and that the matter was now closed.
This is ludicrous on a number of levels. For one thing, it’s not disrespecting the game to try your best to do well, which is what Mercedes was doing when he hit a home run, the best possible outcome for an at bat. It is much more disrespectful to not try your best to do well, which is what the Twins were doing when they sent in a position player to pitch. It is perfectly legitimate strategy to save your bullpen for the next day by not sending one of them out there, but it comes at a cost: the dude you’re sending out sucks at pitching and will get shelled. Mercedes shelled him. This is not a bad thing.
For another, La Russa is on an island here. Despite his assertions that the clubhouse would back him up, everyone in the clubhouse has been very clear that they’re on Mercedes’s side. He didn’t do anything wrong. He did something super right, and both his pride and his livelihood depend on him doing his best every time he steps to the plate. He did his job. Astudillo was out of position.
But what it really comes down to is a boiling anger inside Tony La Russa that the game is being played in a way that he finds aesthetically distasteful. He views it as mockery of the game, classless to keep trying after the outcome has been settled. He thinks it’s embarrassing that a player would act that way. It’s not how things are done to him, and therefore punishment (in the form of allowing his player to get thrown at) must be meted out.
There is a sense inside of La Russa that things are not how they should be. The game is not what it should be. It is his job to do everything he can to set it right, even if that’s just taking a teaspoon of water out of the ocean. He cannot see that there is no problem with the way things are now. He is unable to comprehend that just because he is not used to things being a certain way, that doesn’t mean that way is bad.
Overall, he’s just old, set in his ways, and unable to think critically about why those are his ways. He is a baseball legend, despite his crotchitiness, despite his DUIs. He was a very big part of the story of baseball for several decades, and his behavior now isn’t going to change that. But the story of baseball is onto a new chapter, and it’s one he isn’t particularly interested in reading.
Tony La Russa is essentially the same as all those people railing against a Jeopardy champion for showing his excitement. At least he has the excuse of being 76 years old; it’s a lot less understandable when the person complaining is half as old, damning these modern times. La Russa is a whole lot more influential than some Internet commenter, you would think.
But he doesn’t have to be. He can make himself irrelevant and leave himself even further in the dust. It’s what he did two days ago, and yesterday, and will almost certainly do today. It must be a sad thing to watch the world leave you behind. It must feel absolutely hopeless to fail to drag it back to where you are.