Author Topic: Watch What You Said  (Read 2670 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline EasyAce

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,385
  • Gender: Male
  • RIP Blue, 2012-2020---my big, gentle friend.
Watch What You Said
« on: July 31, 2018, 06:29:57 pm »
On publicly spanking baseball players for thought crimes committed before they played professionally
By Yours Truly
https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/community/watch-what-you-said-lkUACicz7UK6kTW3J_CO3A/



Be careful what you accomplish as you begin your professional baseball career, in the event you were foolish enough to say foolish things on social media before you got anywhere near playing professionally. Otherwise, the social media gumshoes will unearth those foolish things and compel you or someone to compel your public mea culpa, maxima culpa, long enough after the fact to make your formal punishment, if any, seem petty, vindictive, and an Eighth Amendment violation.

Josh Hader made the National League's All-Star team by way of a whale of a first half as a Milwaukee Brewers relief pitcher: 89 strikeouts in 48 innings. The home run Seattle's Jean Segura drove off the lefthander into the left field bullpens in the eighth inning of the game hurt a lot less than the exhuming during the game of, yes, racist, homophobic, and sexist tweets he committed when he was what he himself called an immature seventeen-year-old, not yet bound to professional baseball.

Asked to answer for them after the All-Star bombing demonstration (ten home runs in the game across both leagues), Hader stood up like a man and answered. "As a child, I was immature. I obviously said some things that were inexcusable. That doesn't reflect on who I am as a person today. And that's just what it is," Hader said. "I'm deeply sorry for what I've said and what's been going on. And like I said, that doesn't reflect any of my beliefs going on now. There's nothing before that I believe now."

That Hader's teammates had his back and that the Brewers' clubhouse would likely have been a war front if he believed now what he emitted then escaped baseball's government, which sentenced him to sensitivity, diversity, and inclusiveness training. "His comments are inexcusable and he is taking responsibility for his actions," said the Brewers' general manager David Stearns in assent. "In no way do those sentiments reflect the views of the Brewers organization or our community."

They no longer resemble Hader's sentiments, either, as his squared-up postgame comments to the press should have secured. The concept that people can and do change over the course of even their still-young-enough lives seems absent in baseball government's programming.

An Atlanta Braves rookie, Sean Newcomb, got to within one out of finishing a no-hit, no-run game against the Los Angeles Dodgers Sunday afternoon. The broken no-hitter almost fell short in the public eye and ear compared to the resurrection of racist and homophobic tweets, mostly involving his quoting of a particularly vulgar rap song. As did Haber after the All-Star Game, Newcomb wasted no time getting in front of it. "I felt that it would be good to address it right away and just let people know that I meant nothing by it," he told reporters. "I didn't mean to offend anybody and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. I'll be smarter."

The Braves at this writing have said only that they accept Newcomb's remorse for what he was foolish enough to tweet when he was a teenager, though they made a point of declaring them "no less tolerable" for having been seven-year-old tweets. Several published reports since have said Newcomb talked to his teammates and team staff and apologised for the old tweets, with the same reports saying those teammates and staff had his back, too.

And Washington Nationals infielder Trea Turner has been compelled to apologise publicly, too, for at least one racist and homophobic tweet committed when he, too, was a particularly chatty and feckless teenager.

This apparent and troublesome trend provokes Chicago Cubs pitcher Jon Lester, a ripe old veteran of 34, to suggest the Hader, Newcomb, and Turner blasts from the past ought to be a warning to other young baseball players who may have expressed old and no longer held bigotries online. "If you’re on Twitter, please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn’t want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper," Lester tweeted. "Better yet, don’t say stupid things in the first place. Too many young guys getting burned."

It would be exemplary for us not to have said or believed anything stupid in our youths and unrealistic to assume we were all so spotless. The serious work of play performed by baseball players and other professional athletes imposes nothing upon the laws and mores by which we live except our voluntary commitment of time watching and enjoying that play. (Those who think such play doesn't involve work, and volumes of it, never mind Hall of Famer Willie Stargell's famous aphorism, "The umpire doesn't say, 'Work ball'," have probably never tried to play professionally.) These are not (yet) government aspirants whose ancient thinkings may suggest certain bearings upon how they administer, legislate, or judge.

None of which might impress one Kevin Jenkins, the Twitter tweeter who has owned up to exposing Hader's teenage thought crimes. "Before the tweets, I thought he was a cool guy,” Jenkins told the Associated Press. “An amazing pitcher and an even better person . . . After the tweets, I mean, it’s hard to defend the guy. My opinion has definitely changed. I still feel that he’s an amazing pitcher, but the things he said were inexcusable. None of us know if he’s really changed since then. I felt it was important for people to see the tweets and make their own judgment."

Hader's unapologetic apology didn't impress Jenkins, either. "I’m younger than he was at the time, and no one would ever see anything like that from me," he said bluntly enough. That clash you hear is the one between how wonderful it must be to be so perfect so young and how sad it must be to lack the capacity to accept that the imperfect thinkers among us can, might, and do change.

In the small Long Island city to which my parents moved us when I was still a single-digit boy, badges of honour among too many of my age peers included how few black or Hispanic classmates white students had, and I offer myself up to no peace prize committee for having spurned such badges. Should I join the thought police and hunt down on social media those who felt that way then, and expose their childhood bigotries to their peers and colleagues today, never mind the consequences ancient stupidities stir in today's bizarro world, never mind that I also know for a fact that their bigotries dissipated soon enough?

Imposing such deferred punishment as Haber's upon someone committing a teenage thought crime several years before its commission is exposed, saying or scribbling things he or she no longer believes, has the stench emitted by the kind of father who discovered his son forgot to take out the trash one day seven years earlier and fanned his hapless behind accordingly.
------------------------------------------------------
@Polly Ticks
@Machiavelli
@Applewood
@Bigun
@corbe
@Cyber Liberty
@DCPatriot
@dfwgator
@Freya
@GrouchoTex
@musiclady
@mystery-ak
@Right_in_Virginia
@Sanguine
@TomSea
@WarmPotato


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline Wingnut

  • That is the problem with everything. They try and make it better without realizing the old is fine.
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26,279
  • Gender: Male
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #1 on: July 31, 2018, 06:39:02 pm »
So, he was John Rockered.
I am just a Technicolor Dream Cat riding this kaleidoscope of life.

Offline Bigun

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 51,331
  • Gender: Male
  • Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God
    • The FairTax Plan
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2018, 06:42:24 pm »
All I can say is that I'm eternally thankful that there was no such thig as "social media" when I was a young man!
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
- J. R. R. Tolkien

Offline EasyAce

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,385
  • Gender: Male
  • RIP Blue, 2012-2020---my big, gentle friend.
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #3 on: July 31, 2018, 06:46:02 pm »
So, he was John Rockered.
Not exactly.

Josh Hader, Sean Newcomb, and Trea Turner are being castigated for things they said as feckless teenagers and not public-profile professional athletes, things they seem no longer believe, assuming they ever did believe them or were just being smartass teenagers.

John Rocker was castigated for speaking contemporarily as an adult and a public-profile professional athlete, not for things he said and forgot about as an otherwise obscure kid.


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline EasyAce

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,385
  • Gender: Male
  • RIP Blue, 2012-2020---my big, gentle friend.
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #4 on: July 31, 2018, 06:47:05 pm »
All I can say is that I'm eternally thankful that there was no such thig as "social media" when I was a young man!
@Bigun
You may have to take a number there, buddy.

I wasn't a youthful bigot but I probably said other things as a kid for which they'd hang me today.

Of course, when we were kids we heard it immediately if we spoke out of line . . .


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline skeeter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26,717
  • Gender: Male
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #5 on: July 31, 2018, 07:02:13 pm »
@Bigun
You may have to take a number there, buddy.

I wasn't a youthful bigot but I probably said other things as a kid for which they'd hang me today.

Of course, when we were kids we heard it immediately if we spoke out of line . . .

They woulda taken me away in irons after the first line of eenie meenie miny moe.


Offline GrouchoTex

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7,382
  • Gender: Male
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #6 on: July 31, 2018, 07:05:16 pm »
They woulda taken me away in irons after the first line of eenie meenie miny moe.

 :beer:

Yep.

Offline EasyAce

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,385
  • Gender: Male
  • RIP Blue, 2012-2020---my big, gentle friend.
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #7 on: July 31, 2018, 07:09:52 pm »
They woulda taken me away in irons after the first line of eenie meenie miny moe.



"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

Offline AmericanaPrime

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 85
  • Gender: Male
    • Americana Prime
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #8 on: August 01, 2018, 12:55:06 pm »
Good piece. It’s always astounding to me how we reach back in time and find stuff to ruin people over, especially when someone was a kid. What kid hasn’t said idiotic stuff?
Visit my website @ AmericanaPrime.com!

Offline mountaineer

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 78,125
Re: Watch What You Said
« Reply #9 on: August 01, 2018, 01:02:38 pm »
"When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things."

Somehow the holier-than-thou crowd can't grasp that teenage boys sometimes say and do stupid things - and forget they did so, too.
Support Israel's emergency medical service. afmda.org