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| thank you for you service, Myles Straw |
Time will tell, I suppose, if this is the low-point of the season, but it is certainly a (excuse me, an) low-point of the season, I think we'd all agree. It wasn't so much the four runs "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti allowed in his four innings of work that did it (four runs in four falls into a broad "ungreat but understandable" category), but rather the six runs poor Simeon Woods-Richardson served up on five hits and a couple walks in his single, DFA-forerunning inning (there was a balk in there, too, actually). For the first time in this strange Blue Jays summer, the boo birds, as they say, were well and truly out, and they did not limit their song to SWR, but visited it, too, in a much lighter yet still-discernible fashion, upon a Vladdy groundout to first a little later on. It may not surprise you to learn that I find this to be foolishness. I have never been a home-team booer, and feel little sympathy with those who choose this faithless path. I distinctly remember, in my years of direct SkyDome attendance, a Carlos Delgado groundout to first that Carlos, already ailing from the bad hip that would end his career short of the five-hundred home run mark that would have strengthened his Hall of Fame case significantly (though I was impressed and indeed moved by how close Carlos came on last year's Contemporary Era Committee, closer even than Don Mattingly), did not dash it out in a pointless performance of effort. Complaining about players not foolishly sprinting out every doomed groundball in a long season full of hamstring pulls and messed-up ankles (I find myself in the position of Stoeten, begging these guys to watch one whole season) still holds a place of privilege amongst the most typical of the know-nothing-know-it-all baseball takes, displaying ignorance not just of how baseball is played today, but the way it has been played for at least the near-half-century I can vouch for directly, in addition to the decades before that from which film survives. It's like these guys remember one age-appropriate thing their coach told them in mosquito, and it is the only thought they are able to hold on the matter. Baseball players—not lazy baseball players, not checked-out baseball players, not baseball players who are dogging it—do not, unless the specific circumstance demands it, sprint to first on a routine groundball or a lazy pop-up in the way they would, say, sprint home after tagging up on a shallow fly ball, or the way they would haul trying to score from first on a double. The spectacle of hustle this particular sort of fan craves is coded as "team first" in a scrappy-white-guy sort of way (despite it being, when conspicuous, nothing more than a form of exalting the self [that's not very team-first at all, boys]) and is ultimately, if you will pardon the expression, pure mark shit (go ahead and be Jonathan Papelbon all mad at Bryce Harper if you want, though, I guess ["I was taught in tee-ball to run out everything to first-base," a commenter on that video writes in support of my earlier point about mosquito]). Even the scrappiest, hustlingmost hustler you can call to mind simply has not run super hard through the bag on every groundball or popup in every game in any of their long seasons. It's a totally fake idea, easily disproven by simply watching baseball games (try it! it's fun!). But when things are going poorly, a certain sort of fan seizes on it, because they want that player's failure to be not just an athletic failure, but a moral one as well, the result of lacking a particular virtue that the fan, though of course no athlete, can claim that they themselves do not and would not ever lack (uh oh somebody's exalting the self again!). Never mind the enormous quantity of extra swings Vladdy is reported to be taking every day, the early rounds of batting practice, the cuts in the cages after the game, all the tedious work off the tee: the problem with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s swing this season is that he's not trying and doesn't care, I guess? "Vladmir Guerrero Jr., who famously neither tries nor cares; let's boo him." These are faithless fans who lack spirit and I denounce them so hard right now.
I know it wasn't even all that many people, but stop booing Vladdy, everybody; he's trying, and you're being mean.
KS
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