I remember in college when I had boyfriends asking me why I chose to cover baseball when there were “other more important things going on” or that they looked at me funny for caring so much about a sport.
Maybe it was that I turned baseball into a special interest when I was 16 and have been stuck here ever since. I always saw so much more past that — there were so many important stories in the minor leagues that wasn’t being told. It wasn’t just baseball, but it was life.
Growing up in towns that only had minor league baseball around it made me more familiar minor league life more than I knew what a big league life was, something I only learned more when I moved to Oakland for college. I saw things differently coming from the Central Valley and Southern Nevada. I was around Oakland punks and anarchists, but some of them didn’t really seem to grasp why sports had an impact in society, or why I cared that it did. That almost felt like an antithesis to what being a punk meant to me1.
It’s fine to not like sports — I have many friends who don’t give a shit! — but it always just felt strange to me that there were people who wanted to know me and yet didn’t want to consider it’s not a dichotomy, but rather something that’s interconnected just like everything else is in the world.
I think about that sometimes as I navigate continue writing about baseball in the unrelenting unprecedented times. I did news reporting in college2 and did MMJ shifts in grad school taking news assignments. My brain automatically defaults to current events because I was an editor in college and I was usually pitching stories about localizing national or global events. The editor brain doesn’t really leave you.
The through-line with baseball and politics is much clearer, from Mark DeRosa’s comments about playing for the troops to the president to making social media posts about the World Baseball Classic to potential involvement of MLB players in LA28 — the Olympics, is, and will always be, a geopolitical event — makes politics at the forefront of everything with sports.
Venezuelan players have spoken about the issues that have come up with this admin. Those are not issues that have gone away, and it’s something that will continue for as long as these policies are in place. There’s no way to isolate any of these and talk about “sports as usual” when sports as usual have always been embedded into the fabric of society and society is reflected back in sports.
At a time when MLB wants to become more global — which makes sense especially considering the reach of the World Baseball Classic3 — it would be greatly irresponsible to continue to ignore current events that color how baseball operates in the present4. And when MLB team owners are found to be linked to sales of warehouses to DHS, it becomes of utmost importance to write this context into stories where it’s relevant.
The world is falling apart, and it’s showing up in baseball, too. I keep thinking how important it is for me to continue covering this sport because of its connections to current events. Baseball is more than just the game on the field; I think it’s long past time us reporters need to treat it as something that’s part of geopolitics. Reframing looking at baseball in this way helped me realize that this sport is much deeper than what a guy’s pitching line is from an outing — it’s about how they go about balancing their jobs and also how this administration affects their livelihood, and everything matters. Everything always will.
1 “Pick people up when they’re down and protect others” has always been the mantra in my specific punk scenes and one that still guides me.
2 I went to a D3 women’s college; there were just more news stories than sports stories to cover most of the time.
3 The games where Venezuela played was majority a Venezuelan fan crowd.
4 Yeah, I know I sound like a Sorkin character. This has been established by pretty much everyone in my life.