2013 MLB Regular Season running thread

"Racists are racist on Twitter."

Always a tremendously enlightening angle for a reporter to latch onto.

Remember when the Spurs had the Mexican-American boy sing the national anthem? Deadspin did their standard, "Racists are racist on Twitter" story, shaming a couple dozen Tweeters. But a large percentage of the people using the word "beaner" had Hispanic names, which makes me think they were using it ironically/as a term of endearment.

 

I'm curious. Where did the faux outrage over the All-Star Game tie originate? It seems like a made-for-social-media phenomenon, but that was largely before social media. It had to be Internet-driven somehow, though, right? I can't imagine how else people would be mobilized to react that angrily to a non-story. Or was that one of the last great whole cloth sports controversies driven by the mainstream media?

 

Traditional media accounts of that game did not ignore the farcical aspects of both teams running out of pitchers. I think hilarity/scorn was universal among baseball followers, and it was not some meme "spread" by the Internet.

 

To this day, I can't figure out why anybody would much give a shit.

 

Because it was funny, and the fact poor Bud was so obviously mortified made it funnier still. If people can't laugh at baseball's tendency for self-inflicted stupidity/lunacy, our nation is in real trouble.

 

I guess I don't quite understand what was funny about it to begin with and why he was mortified. They ran out of pitchers in an extra-inning exhibition game.

I mean, it was funny in a laugh-with-baseball way. "Oops, we ran out of pitchers!" But just not sure why it was a laugh-at-baseball opportunity.

 

The funny part was that they didn't have a plan in place for dealing with it, so Selig had to scramble for an ad hoc solution. And that everyone already hated Selig.

 

Sure they did. And they utilized it.

 

They literally had a meeting on the mound in the middle of the game to make up a solution on the spot. That's not having a plan in place.

 

Dick, you're forgetting that baseball was thought to be on the verge of yet another strike. That they reached a deal in 2002 was a very big upset. So three weeks ahead of that, people hated Selig already. Hated him.

And: The Caminiti story had just been published in SI a month earlier.

And:

 

It's an exhibition game. I mean, good lord, I still can't believe that 11 years down the road, people still see this as some institutional failing by Major League Baseball. MLB is at fault, particularly Selig, for taking itself so ultra-seriously that it reacted in the way it did to it, instead of having some fun about it and moving on. But the self-righteous keyboard jockeys are at fault, too, for leveling criticism in the first place for MLB to have to then react to.

 

You're trying to come at this from a preconceived general position and it's twisting you into weird spots. They didn't have a plan in place.

You are above it all and too cool to care about an exhibition game, and that's cool. I'm above some stupid stuff too.

The entire event was heavily marketed that year around the idea that it was more than just an exhibition game. There had been a major push to make it seem more important and show that the result mattered. *That* made it especially embarrassing that they had to scramble to make a decision about what to do in a situation where they couldn't get a decisive result, especially when that situation was fairly predictable given the nature of the game.