Politics and baseball

What happens when liberal sports journalists and conservative athletes collide in Boston? The liberal journalist writes a screed about the stupidity and inanity of the lumbering Neanderthal.

It seems Red Sox relief pitcher Mike Timlin hung a bumper sticker in his clubhouse locker that showed an image of the peace sign and said, “The footprint of the American Chicken.” Boston Herald sportswriter Howard Bryant, who just joined the paper after covering the Oakland A’s and before that the New York Yankees, took exception to the bumper sticker. So he found two other people in the clubhouse, only one of whom is a player, who disagreed with sticker. And then he commenced to write an ideological screed in the newspaper about Timlin’s politics. To their credit, other sportswriters in the Herald and the Boston Globe took exception to Bryant’s article.

Writing about this in the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell surmises:

All wordsmiths who hang around with jocks must have a bit of nagging discomfort: Here I am with my college degree and my shelf full of books, they must think, and I get looked down on and treated as a wannabe by a bunch of lunks who can’t spell their names. If that really bothers you—and the venom in his prose indicates that it really bothers Bryant—then maybe you should sue your college guidance counselor for malpractice. But on top of that, Bryant is carrying a second burden. He has an idea that sportswriters have a particularly urgent sort of social responsibility. One can admire Bryant’s versatility and insist that, in this, he is wrong. Social responsibility is for the “A” section, which is perhaps where Bryant belongs. If he were to return to a kind of journalism where he could address the big social and political questions more directly, it might be good for him. It would certainly be good for sportswriting.

Bryant is ridiculous. The locker room is not his domain. He is a guest there. If he were invited to a party at someone’s house and found a crucifix hanging there, he would probably write a column about it, excoriating his host for his fundamentalist views and intolerant lifestyle. The clubhouse, and especially Timlin’s locker, are nobody’s business but the player’s themselves. Reporters are guests there, not privileged members. It seems being a prima donna is not limited to those who play on the field.