Further Thoughts on The Cutting of Juan Rivera

Don't cry for him; he's already cut.

The lowest form of sportswriting is that which conflates athletic performance and personal character. It is distressingly common (in the "ay, madam, it is . . . common" Hamlet double meaning way), always stupid, and often racist. Hustling, undersized scrappy white player really shows you how this game ought to be played. And he's a hell of a guy, too! You can tell by the way he hustles scrappily! Athletic but troubled black player, on the other hand, is not the kind of player or man you want your kids looking up to. And don't get me started on naturally gifted but lackadaisical Latino! If only he could get his head on straight, hustle scrappily, and get whiter, you'd really have something you could jerk off to, wouldn't you, boomer sportswriter? 


But let's put the not-that-subtle racism of mainstream sports journalism to one side for a minute and just focus on the extent to which the equation of performance and character is the dumbest thing imaginable. First of all, it just is, right? This is utterly obvious, and yet missed by a staggering percentage of people who write about or broadcast sports. In no other line of work is on-the-job excellence so naively read as illustrative of a person's worth as a human being. Do we expect there to be a correlation between someone's ability to perform heart surgery or drive a bus or bag your groceries and their likelihood to be, I don't know, an emotionally available parent, or a neighbour who will occasionally mow a little over into your yard to save you like five minutes the next time you do it? Of course not. Of course not. But if you play baseball a certain way, you're not just a good baseball player; you're a quality person, and maybe even a leader.


The dumbest instance of this in my life as baseball fan relates, naturally, to the Blue Jays, and specifically to a strange period in which Carlos Delgado was publicly criticized for not being the kind of leader and character guy that Raul Mondesi clearly was. I am not making this up; this was in the papers. Richard Griffin is usually the source of the worst nonsense concerning Toronto baseball, and there is of course no exception to this rule to be found here. But he wasn't alone. How could the writers tell Mondesi was a character guy? He went hard out there. He dove headlong into any and every base. He gunned the ball in from right field, even when there was no play to be made anywhere. He'd take a huge turn around first on any single to the outfield, just to show you how eager he was to try to stretch it into a double. In short, he played the game right way, as the writers saw it; this revealed his character, and his ability to lead. Why didn't Carlos Delgado do any of these things? Why couldn't he be a leader, someone for the young players to look up to and admire, like Raul Mondesi? I am not kidding you; these are things that were written about, and taken up in the sports talk of the day.  It all reads as just incredibly ridiculous now, because Carlos Delgado is Carlos Delgado, and Raul Mondesi was revealed in the fullness of time to be clubhouse cancer whose hard-living lifestyle nearly sunk not only himself but the career of young Felipe Lopez, too, who has said that without the trade out of Toronto he never would have gotten his head straight. Also, Mondesi was caught stealing electricty.


Anyway, all of this is by way of saying that when I say Juan Rivera is an asshole and I'm glad he got cut, I am not trying to suggest that I have been able to deduce anything about his character off the field, his value as a human being by the way he plays baseball. I don't think that just because Juan Rivera looked like a lazy and incompetent asshole of a baseball player that he is any way a bad person. Juan Rivera, for all I know, is a loving husband, a proud father, a dutiful son, a caring brother, and the kind of cousin you actually keep in touch with. But on the field he was an asshole. Maybe he's an awesome guy. But he played baseball like an asshole. And I am glad that asshole got cut.


KS