That's why this year's baseball narrative was so startling and effective in terms of ratings. I think of it as: root for the lesser of two evils. In this case, the lesser of those was either a team that broke the rules to win the title or a team that marketed its racism.
Three years ago, the Houston Astros won the 2017 World Series, apparently with the help of an intricate system of cheating, which involved shooting video of the opposing team's pitching signals and relaying them to their own batters. The subsequent punishments meted out by Major League Baseball (MLB) were clearly designed not to be harsh enough to damage the Astro's future possibilities in any way. And when the team showed up at the 2021 World Series, it was with a new manager, Dusty Baker, a highly appropriate yet seemingly cynical selection of the team owners.
Baker, after all, is Black and celebrated for his integrity and decency. As a player, he was mentored by Atlanta slugger Hank Aaron. As a veteran manager, he was well-liked by his players and by the media. For a team that had cheated the last time around, he was, in other words, a seemingly unassailable and all-too-necessary figure. (Well, actually, maybe not quite. Despite managing slugger Barry Bonds for 10 years at San Francisco, he claims to have had no idea whether Bonds used steroids, which, for some at least, makes him either a liar or a self-blinkered leader.)
In any case, Baker's reputation made it possible for fans and the media to look past the Astros' previous transgressions long enough to focus instead on those of the Atlanta Braves. In a time when the Cleveland Indians have changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians and the former Washington Redskins have dropped their (as yet to be replaced) terrible name, Atlanta and Major League Baseball nevertheless defended not only that team's use of what was considered a racist slur ("Braves"), but its promotion of the despicable tomahawk chop gesture among its fans in the stands, which former President Trump so notoriously demonstrated when he attended game four of the series.
If perhaps you don't know what happened but still care, the "Braves" beat the Astros, four games to two, to win the series. In what once was arguably the national pasttime, they seemed to prove that racism tops cheating in Trumpist America during this season of moral drift.
Email Slurs
But what about the sport that left baseball in the dust, and now passes for the national pastime? Can diverse bigotry beat anti-vaxx mendacity in pro football?
Last October, Jon Gruden, justifiably famous for good-old white mediocrity, resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders after a trove of emails revealed him to be an equal-opportunity slinger of slurs. Those emails were discovered while lawyers were investigating alleged sexual harassment at the Washington Football Team (those former Redskins). The Gruden emails had mostly been exchanged 10 years ago with Bruce Allen, then the Washington team president when Gruden was an ESPN sports analyst. Racial and homophobic slurs abounded in those old, white, frat-boy-style exchanges.
Allen was fired and Gruden is now suing the NFL and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, for allegedly leaking those e-mails in an attempt, he claims, to divert attention from the transgressions of the league and of Goodell himself. It's not all that far-fetched a notion in this time of conspiracies. Who knows what medical, racial, and financial wrongdoing pro football continues to conceal today?
It may be unlikely but, should the upcoming Super Bowl feature, say, the Raiders or that still-to-be-renamed Washington team against the Green Bay Packers, it could rival the World Series as a "lesser of two evils" (or greater of two evils?) event. Matched against the bigotry that lost Gruden his job would be the peculiar prevarications of the Packers' once exemplary quarterback, Aaron Rodgers. He lied about getting his Covid vaccinations, putting teammates, fans, and sports reporters at risk.
One of my favorite sports commentators weighed in mightily on the subject. The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins wrote:
"Lord knows Rodgers is inventive with the football, but of all the dodging, narcissistic, contrived moves. 'Yeah, I'm immunized,' he said, so artificially, when asked in the preseason whether he was vaccinated. That was a lie by omission. And not just a single lie but a daily willful deception along with a weirdly callous charade. On multiple occasions he went into postgame news conferences which tend to be closely packed, fetid affairs unmasked. And there should be some queries about the steam and sauna and rehab rooms, too."
Former National Basketball Association star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was fearful of the damage Rodgers might have done to the very image of pro athletes by, among other things, claiming that
"this idea that it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, it's just a total lie" If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid and, unfortunately, dying of Covid?"
As Jabbar pointed out,
"Those two statements don't even belong together. Statistics from many sources conclude that around 97% of those being hospitalized or who have died in the past several months are unvaccinated. The CDC found that the unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die than those vaccinated. If he thinks that's a lie, what credible evidence does he have? None."
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