What happens when you choose to be horrible
Nothing good, at least for other people
For years, Aubrey Huff has been a pathetic troll on Twitter.
There’s no other way to say it, no way to sugarcoat it, and no reason to either. Huff took pride in trolling people with right-wing talking points. Repeating word-for-word the garbage he’d heard on Newsmax an hour earlier was his favorite hobbby, and he spent just about all day on there, spreading misinformation and, when called out on it, laughing about how he’d owned the libs. It was a core part of his identity.
This is who he is. This is what he likes.
Huff got suspended by Twitter yesterday, and while there was no official word on why, he had been promoting an anti-vax event in San Diego that he apparently attended (according to Twitter Superstar Weed Detective/Wolfman Zack). He’s been spreading COVID denialism non-stop for the last 17 months or so, and eventually that catches up to a person. There’s only so much claiming a healthy immune system is better than a vaccination, for example, that Twitter can take before they have to say, “You know what? Nah.”
There are consequences to this kind of behavior. You have to send a strong message that if a person wants to be part of society, they have to play by society’s rules. Sure, maybe the line is way out there, but once someone crosses it, they know what they’re getting into and that there is no coming back from-
I hate it when I’m in the middle of a sentence and then a tweet embeds itself in my article disproving what I was saying. Very rude.
Barstool is a wildly sexist website that repeatedly makes demeaning comments about women — when Sam Ponder at ESPN objected to her network airing a show starring two Barstool personalities because a few years earlier the site had called her “a ‘BIBLE THUMPING FREAK’ whose primary job requirement was to ‘make men hard,’” Barstool founder Dave Portnoy called her “a ‘fucking slut’ who should ‘sex it up and be slutty,’” as one example — and then sics its millions of social media followers on anyone who dares criticize them.
This is what Major League Baseball is eager to partner with.
Barstool has not backed down from any of their poor behavior, and they will not back down. It’s not in their DNA. They’re going to do their thing, their legion of sycophants will harass anyone notable who criticizes them, fewer people will criticize them, and then they’ll continue doing their thing. It’s a tidy little cycle that means they never have to change or grow or do better because no one will make them.
This is what Major League Baseball is eager to partner with.
This is their choice, to be awful, just as it’s Huff’s choice. That’s not to equate them with each other — I don’t care who’s on top of the Horrible Power Rankings, because just being on the list is enough — but it’s a commonality. Huff paid a price for it. Barstool isn’t paying a price for it. It is possible, in fact, that they will be paid a price to continue being themselves, because Major League Baseball doesn’t give one single solitary fuck about anything other than getting as many dollars today as humanly possible.
Which brings us to why they’re considering this deal: gambling.
It all comes back to gambling, doesn’t it? Remember when we never had to think about how gambling would affect the business of baseball? Remember when appeasing the league’s partners at DraftKings or Bally’s wasn’t the main reason the league made business decisions? Well, those days are over, and now we’re in the new world. In that new world, MLB is looking for outlets to do gambling-themed broadcasts, and up near the top of their list is a certain misogynistic website that happens to have some gambling content on it.
Craig Calcaterra says that gambling people are not impressed by Barstool’s gambling content, but I think that misses the point. As long as there is gambling content, it will drive people to gambling and to MLB’s corporate gambling partners. If the advice is good, people will keep playing and engaging with baseball-related content. If the advice is bad, and the corporate partners make more money, so much the better.
Side note: I usually don’t like using the word “content” as a catch-all for Things You Are Entertained By because it makes what it’s describing seem banal and worthless, but in this case that’s exactly why it’s the right word.
In MLB’s mind, they’re killing two birds with one stone by both making additional gambling-related revenue and also appealing to a young, hip audience of Barstool fans. I think those are both bad ideas.
Getting into the gambling business means that people are going to start asking questions about the integrity of the game very soon. Is the league promoting the best on-field product possible, or are they promoting the product that will make the most money for Bally’s? What happens when they have to decide between the two? How can you trust that they’re trying to make good sports instead of trying to make money?
And using Barstool is just as short-sighted. It has plenty of fans, sure, but those fans are a very insular community that are hated by a lot of other people, who will now think much less of MLB because they’re partners with Barstool. There are women who read the site, but there are also tons of women who are repulsed by them and anyone associated with them. And now if MLB has chosen to be anyone associated with them, there are consequenes to that too.
I don’t want to act like the Barstool deal is done or a sure thing, because reports are that it’s neither. But the fact that it was seriously considered is troubling. The fact that it is still in active negotiations is telling. We have seen individual baseball players choose to be awful. We’ve seen the league do it before too. We’ll see it all again. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.