I don’t want to come across like I like months without baseball better than months with baseball. I would rather be watching baseball now than watching arguments over baseball awards and Hall of Fame votes and whether the Blue Jays should have offered more money to Eduardo Rodriguez before the Tigers swooped in and got him. Ancillary baseball content is absolutely less interesting than actual baseball.
And yet, here we are in awards season, and it’s enthralling. Not the awards themselves, of course, which are fine and people will be very happy to get trophies, which is swell, but the discourse. Folks, I am talking about The Discourse.
Because people get mad about awards. They get furious about them when they don’t get exactly what they want, exactly how they want it. They get butthurt about one guy getting one second place vote over one other guy, as one example. They tweet invectives at Dan Szymborski for giving his first place Rookie of the Year vote to Taylor Rogers instead of Jonathan India:
Or they brigade Andrew Baggarly for putting Mike Soroka ahead of Pete Alonso on his 2019 ROY ballot:
It is phenomenally idiotic, a true paean to idiocy and entitlement. “How dare this one voter cast a vote that went against my favorite candidate but did not cost him the award? Is it because you like attention? You must love attention. Well, here’s that ATTENTION you love, you JACKASS.”
Giants fans are not exempt from this, by the way. When the NL MVP results are announced on Thursday, and Brandon Crawford winds up 6th instead of 4th — as if there’s any real difference — there will be a segment of fandom that goes absolutely ballistic. They’ll cite WAR or they’ll say “BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS DEFENSE” or they’ll point out that the winning candidate’s team was not even close to the playoffs, all of which are true, but none of that is why they’re mad. They’re mad because their guy should have done better, and he didn’t, and it’s unfair and wrong.
I love this.
Presumably, my mileage would vary if this hate was directed against me, but it’s not, so problem solved! As it is, though, it’s as harmless an expression of angry tribalism as you’ll find in the world. The brigading tends to stop fairly quickly, and while the bitterness will linger — two of those three tweets to Baggarly above came multiple months after Alonso was announced the ROY winner — it usually just survives as low-grade pettiness, simmering impotent resentment at the unjust state of the world for denying your beloved player a unanimous Rookie of the Year title.
Buster Posey was not a unanimous Rookie of the Year in 2010, by the way. No one has ever cared less about anything.
This is exactly what sports are for. The world is full of injustices that matter, so many that you can get overwhelmed just thinking about them. The world is complex, an impossibly convoluted network of relationships and structures, any one of which you could spend your life trying to understand and still come up lacking. Sports are simple. You have your team, they’re the good guys, and anyone who opposes them is immoral. When you’re engaged in the sports world, you’re knowingly buying into that worldview.
When someone gets mad about awards voting, then, they’re playing the part that they’re supposed to play. The sportswriter has disrespected the Good Guys; therefore the sportswriter is a Bad Guy. The sportswriter’s reasons for doing this are Nefarious and Vile, while the poor Good Guy player who was disrespected now has one more obstacle to overcome.
Sports inherently feel like a good-vs-evil story, even though they’re not, except when the Giants play the Dodgers. Hating sportswriters for an irrelevant vote is the natural and ultimate conclusion of this. It kinda sucks for the sportswriter, but it’s a reminder of why sports are fun in the first place. You get sucked into this story. You know the story is silly, but you go with it and feel the things you’re supposed to feel. The world, in this one way, is simple and it works the way it should. How can you not like that?
I mean, again, unless people are yelling at you specifically, which would be quite unpleasant.