Look, if there’s one thing I love writing about, it’s topical items that will draw clicks and get me attention. But here’s my dilemma: what if there are multiple Giants-related topical items at a time? Because on Tuesday night, after the Giants won, the hottest topic in Giantsland was this:
Okay, great. Can do. Why aren’t fans coming to games? That’s a thing to write about for a Thursday morning when-
But wait! A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES!
That’s a Baseball Prospectus prospect writer, by the way. Now, I don’t know for sure that this is where yesterday’s Discourse started, but it seems like a good bet; this is someone who is reasonably prominent and here he is, accusing the Giants of cheating not because he has proof but because it’s something that’s on his mind.
Anyway, what am I to do here? Pick one and risk the other being the resurgent Narrative? Pick neither in the hopes that some other story will come to dominate today’s discussions for some stupid reason? Friends, no. I pick both.
The reason Giants fans aren’t coming out to the games is that the team is cheating.
I know this take might seem a little “hot” for some of you out there, but I’m known for stirring the pot with my controversial opinions, so you should be used to it by now.
Some of you might see some logical flaws with this argument. Like, since when do all Giants fans everywhere know they’re cheating? How would you quantify cheating’s effects on attendance? Are they even cheating? Why isn’t there evidence of cheating? Aren’t there like a thousand other factors why attendance might be down? Aren’t I aware that this hypothesis is absolutely untethered from reality?
But think about it. They used to be bad and now they’re good, ipso facto cheating. They used to get good attendance when they didn’t cheat and now they’re getting bad attendance when they do cheat, ipso facto cheating causes bad attendance. The dots are all right there, as long as you have the courage to connect them.
So what’s the mechanism? Are all Giants season ticket holders on a listserv that the mainstream media don’t know about? Are there secret discussions about how the team is obviously cheating and they should boycott but they should also not tell anyone in the wider world because they don’t want their beloved team to be embarrassed? I mean, there must be. Maybe when the Giants sent out their calls for season ticket holders to renew, there was a check box saying “do you like cheating” and if you didn’t check it, you didn’t get your tickets.
But it’s important to accept that Giants fans are moral and good and can’t abide a season full of cheaters, and therefore they are boycotting the season. They are doing it quietly, though, because what’s the use of a boycott if you talk about it all the time?
It might seem silly to speculate about all this, but that’s what we do, right? We take minute data points and from them extrapolate a wider world wholly without any supporting evidence. Sometimes we do it by implication:
Sometimes, like Jarrett Seidler, we just state it outright. Do we consider extenuating factors? Do we consider that the Giants put a massive amount of brainpower and cash into the project of improving their team, and that it worked?
Do we consider that attendance is down because we are still in a pandemic, and fewer people are available to go straight from work to Oracle Park, and public transit ends earlier, and people are a little more anxious about money, and that all of these factors together might mean that a Tuesday night game against the worst team in baseball might be less appealing than in a typical year?
My friends, we do not consider any of that. We take disparate data points and jump to conclusions like Tom Smykowski. We get angry at the Giants for being better than we thought they would be, and blame them for doing something wrong. We find a way to get attention for bad opinions, and then say those bad opinions and get our attention for them.
This is how to do sports writing. You say something dumb, get clicks, and do it again the next day. So I am sticking with this: Giants attendance is low because fans are mad the team is cheating in an undefined way that is definitely happening. The evidence is overwhelming, in that I’m saying it is.
Doug - this makes so much sense, I'm stunned that it hasn't been picked up by MLB Rumors. Yet.
But you have overlooked a salient factor in this sports-writing echo chamber, where 'beat writers' (and that could have multiple meanings) talk to themselves in the twitter universe, and use that platform to lecture fans who are otherwise beneath their contempt. It's a win-win!