Good reading

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At Vice, former Mets.com reporter Aaron Taube details the way his season on the Mets’ beat destroyed his fandom. Aaron is a good dude and a good writer and was, long before his stint in the press box, a TedQuarters reader with whom I corresponded by email with some frequency.

The piece deals thematically with issues similar to some I’m aiming to get at in something I’m hoping to post later today, so I was almost reluctant to link it, but its quality and Aaron’s good-dudedness won out. Needless to say, covering the Mets has not killed my own fandom, but it has changed it in countless ways. One key difference, I suspect, between my experience and Aaron’s is that I’ve never been forced churn out copy about baseball games and baseball players for work, so if I feel I need a break from it for whatever reason I can take one at my discretion. There are aspects of this job that feel like a job, for sure, but the going-to-baseball-games and writing-about-baseball parts — not as big a part of mine as they were of his — never do.

Also, you know, we’re all our own unique snowflakes and such, and this particular snowflake happens to a) love baseball so, so, so much and b) not think there’s really all that much in the world worth taking seriously.

My mother always said, “If you don’t have anything interesting to say, show some watersports accidents.”

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This is a busy day, and slow getting started to boot. Sorry about the P.O.D.

Also, speaking of my mother and watersports, this is her favorite movie scene of all-time. We saw this in the theater and she laughed so hard I thought she was going to be escorted out. Fat people falling, foul language and dudes getting hit in the junk with stuff are pretty much my mom’s three favorite things. My mom has a Ph.D.

Since no one asked me

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Our analysis shows that while black players are not discriminated against, foreign-born players—of which the vast majority are Latino—find themselves at a disadvantage.

– Adam Felder and Seth Amitin, the Atlantic.

Both the Atlantic’s study on racism in broadcast booths and Russell Carleton’s follow-up for Baseball Prospectus are worth reading, and put data to assumptions long since made in many baseball discussions. I believe we are all helplessly biased in every single thing we do, so it’s not surprising to learn that some rather unfortunate biases might play out statistically when so many words are tracked and coded. Of course, those tracking and coding are biased too, and so on.

But that’s besides the point. No one asked me and probably no one ever will, but in neither study did anyone mention the role of language in what’s being attributed to racism in broadcast booths.

It doesn’t say, but I assume the broadcasts being studied were English-language broadcasts. Broadcasters travel with teams and regularly spend time in the home and away clubhouses. When you see a guy every day and communicate with him casually, you develop a relationship with him and, presumably, it becomes way more difficult to go up to the broadcast booth and rip him for his laziness. I’ve had this happen myself: It’s conflicting, but there are players I have been reluctant to criticize even when I feel their play calls for it because they are simply too friendly. Maybe that’s unprofessional, but it’s decidedly human.

So I’d love to see these studies broken down further. Are Latino players who speak fluent English as likely as their monolingual counterparts to be criticized on a broadcast? I suspect not, but then there’s certainly some selection bias present in the group of foreign-born players willing and able to learn to speak fluent English.