FOX - Baseball has become somewhat of a gentleman's sport over the years. Ostentatious celebrations and confident bat flips are criticized rather than celebrated, and players are largely expected to act like they've been there before. There is very little room for personality in the game today, and when players like Bryce Harper do show their swagger, they catch heat for their actions.
According to Harper, that criticism of individuality is exactly why baseball is becoming what he calls a "tired sport." In a recent interview with ESPN The Magazine, Harper explained why he thinks baseball's moral code actually hurts the game.
"Baseball's tired," Harper said. "It's a tired sport, because you can't express yourself. You can't do what people in other sports do. I'm not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it's the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that's Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig -- there's so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.
"... You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players -- Steph Curry, LeBron James. It's exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton -- I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It's that flair. The dramatic."
Harper has a point. Baseball is a tough game to watch for an American public with an ever decreasing attention span. Unlike other sports, there's no clock in baseball, and games can easily drag on hours longer than a football, basketball or hockey game. When there is no personality and nothing that makes a player or a team stand out among the monotony of balls and strikes, line drives and fly balls, it is easy to see why viewers might lose interest.
Beyond a great play in the field or a monster performance at bat, what really gets people talking these days are shareable moments from games, and oftentimes it takes personality to create those moments. That is not an idea baseball purists will be fond of -- in baseball, players are expected to be professional at all times. Any sign of individuality is a dark mark against a player rather than a positive attribute.
I don't really get what Bryce is saying here. First he's complaining about how you can't "express yourself" in baseball like he's a fucking starving artist, then he lists off like ten of its most popular players who all perform with some degree of flair or flamboyance and talks about how exciting they are. I guess the gist of this is he's saying baseball isn't as exciting as football or basketball because there isn't enough song and dance. That it's not as appealing to kids and to casual sports fans because there aren't enough bells and whistles. He's totally right. Showboating and other shit like that does make things more exciting. It ups the ante a bit and that's fine with me. Manny Ramirez was the biggest showboat there was but he embraced that and just kept being himself until the day he retired/was run out of the league for always taking all the steroids. I hated him but he made things infinity more exciting and was one of the biggest reasons those 2000s Yanks/Sox rivalries were as awesome as they were.
The problem is today if you root AGAINST a guy like that then you're automatically an old, white, crusty baseball writer. Every player who showboats needs everybody to unconditionally love everything about their lives and the way they conduct themselves on the field and if there's any dissent at all they need to post a fucking memoir about the "haters" on their instagram and bitch about it to ESPN The Magazine. Newsflash Bryce - there are MILLIONS of people that love you and guys like Cam Newton and bat flips and hair flips and dabbing and all that other shit. There's a reason you're two of the most marketable names in sports today. BUT there's also a lot of people who don't like guys like you and that's OKAY. In sports we root for players who exemplify character traits that we value. Some people like the strong, silent type. Some people like the loud, flamboyant type. We don't need to start talking about the crumbling of society ever time someone flips a bat or celebrates a touchdown and we don't all need to go flying off the handle about how baseball is boring and NFL fans are racist every time someone with a more conservative viewpoint has an opinion on sports. Just shut up and do what you wan to do and stop worrying about what everyone thinks.
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