We love The Athletic, we'll miss our newspaper

Who reads this?

I mean, obviously, you do. Morgan reads it. I read it, sometimes. We have over 200 subscribers -- as always thank you all. But, our audience is small and niche. That might not necessarily be true forever (*whispers* tell your friends about us) but two writers with a preference for America’s third favorite sport and moderately heterodox rhapsodies about New York sports heroes will only have so broad of a readership. But, while I’m always thinking about making our work interesting for a variety of sports fans, one of my biggest tensions about our focus is that it rarely reaches the sports fans I talk smack with in real life.

The friends I grew up and still kick it with today aren’t snarking on Twitter or engaging in regular discourse about what does and does not constitute a sandwich. But they're still passionate sports fans who love the game as much as I do. But unlike my Hardwood Paroxysm- reading self, they might get their fix from the sports back page. So, like Morgan, I wonder what serves their appetite for sports news and updates. And I mourn any trend that would make it less likely for people to get basically reliable news, updates, and commentary on sports.

I’m hopeful The Athletic fills the void and find its people (of which I am almost certainly one). But like Morgan, I’m curious what this all means for average, everyday newspapers. Hope you enjoy her take.

Leadoff Hitter: Longform that lays off the first pitch.

Time Magazine

Time Magazine

Earlier this year I tried to purchase a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle. I wanted the digital subscription; I’d route the Sunday paper to my parents’ house. But when I typed in their zip code, a bot informed me that my childhood home was outside their delivery radius. I raised my eyebrows—I remembered my neighbors receiving the Chronicle. I messaged the paper on Twitter to confirm that the area fell outside their borders. They didn’t return my inquiry. I moved on.

I haven’t lived in the Bay Area for nearly a decade and haven’t given much thought to a return. With the exception of my parents and handful of childhood friends, the Giants remain my strongest tie to the area. I frequently stream the local sports radio station. I read the local beat writers on Twitter and the Chronicle (until the paywall shuts me out) and flew back to San Francisco last year specifically to attend a Giants sportswriter events. (I was flattered when a beat writer told me he recognized me in the audience from Twitter.) I’ve come closer to purchasing a subscription for a newspaper in a part of the country I’ve never lived in during my adult life than the city in which I’ve spent the past three years.

So, let’s talk about The Athletic. For those of you who outside of Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and Cleveland, meet an ad-free, subscription-only, hyperlocal sports site. Its Bay Area iteration launched this week, notorious Twitter-blockerTim Kawakami, its editor-in-chief. The site has cash: their latest investment round netted $5.8 million. This happened not even 100 days after ESPN laid off 100 or so journalists.

“The plan is to scoop up laid-off writers,” reported Bloomberg News recently noted. That may still be the plan. It’s certainly good news after the ESPN layoffs, after Vocativ’s shut down, after Vice Sports was the two percent of jobs the company recently eliminated. Long live The Athletic. So what’s the catch?

Potentially nothing. But there’s this:

When [The Athletic] launched in Cleveland earlier this year, it poached one of the most well-known local writers covering the Cleveland Cavaliers, and got 1,000 subscribers within 48 hours.

Kawakami and F&F friend Marcus Thompson? These are longtime writers with fanbases, poached from area newspapers. As a journalist who cheers for local news outlets and shudders at their financial struggles, these details tied a knot in my stomach.

Why? Here’s what one beat writer told news analysis org Nieman Lab in 2014:

Most of the [team’s] fans aren’t reading our paper. But most of them are going to my blog once in a while if not every day. They also go to [my newspaper’s] Internet site. My job security comes from that. My job is only still there for online journalism, because [media consumers] could just pick up [another paper’s] newspaper content [on the team he covers]. We offer more than just basic stories on our online sites.

In other words, sports played a critical role in keeping his institution relevant to a wider and broader audience, a prospect increasingly important in an era where the media itself has been the frequent target of the president. The New Yorker noted this last month that the President’s critiques of the media have devastated at least one local Colorado newspaper.

During the election season, it’s common for some people to cancel their subscriptions, but last year the Sentinel lost more of them than usual. That’s one of the ironies of the age: The New York Times and the Washington Post, which Trump often attacks by name, have gained subscribers and public standing, while a small institution like the Sentinel has been damaged within its community.

So yeah. I’m concerned that key stars ditching their longtime outlets for sites that specifically reward their talents as regional sports media will be another paper cut or two that kills the newspaper.

Here’s why I give a damn about local newspapers. At the basis of most communities: a common text. Many colleges ask their incoming freshmen to read the same book the summer before school starts. Consider the way entire religious communities center around the Bible or Quran. 

The political community isn’t unique. This is a gap historically fulfilled by newspapers. This medium traditionally provides a common record to learn and better understand our past, allow frustrated citizens a place to express their complaints and content residents to articulate their gratitude, and learn who they are as a people tied together by geography. One reason I love sports: it offers folks an easy, non-polemic thing to love, support, and rag on.

Not surprisingly, The Athletic has found one of the few final value-adds the local newspaper has in 2017. Knowledgeable, opinionated, longtime writers who know, love, and tolerate the market, the team, and the fans. You do not raise Thompson or Kawakami overnight. In fact, you pay time and money to make one, then just plain money to keep them.

As referenced above, it’s been a seriously exhausting time to be in the newspaper industry. 
This administration's wrath at the media or The Athletic (probably the first) could be the death knell of many a local rag but it’s been hemorrhaging since it failed to take the internet seriously. We’re in a period of cynicism and rage at the media that will bankrupt a number of local newspapers. Increasingly, we won’t have the lure of local sports to encourage those most tempted by #FakeNews to patronize legitimate, hardworking, fact-checking outlets.

Here is the end of Bloomberg’s piece. It’s a fitting conclusion to my own:

[One Athletic investor] used to work at Yahoo! Inc., and says local sports coverage inspired unusual loyalty among readers. "We knew from our experience it was an insatiable and increasingly underserved market," he said. "Everybody lives somewhere."

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The rebirth of Cleveland starts with the end of Chief Wahoo.

By the time you read Foul and Fair next week, we’ll know who won the World Series. Seriously. Give it a week--or the next three days, and somebody’s narrative that’s lasted my entire life and decades more--will cease to exist. So sit back and sip from your teacup of sentimentality this weekend. 

Actually, don’t. This week, we have an interview with Jacqueline Keeler, a Native American activist and co-founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry. In addition to her work trying to pressure schools, colleges, and professional sports leagues to remove stereotypical mascots, Keeler, whose lineage includes both Navajo and Plains’ ancestry, is also campaigning against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Friends, while many of us have been consumed with sports and the election, for weeks now hundreds of Native Americans have been protesting its construction, demanding that the government ban an energy pipeline that could potentially compromise their water supply and would run precariously close to their sacred lands. As of writing this intro, a federal judge paused the construction of the pipeline the same week authorities moved in to crackdown on the protesters’ camp. (Read more.)

All that to say, think for a second if you’ve paid attention to the MLB playoffs’, which the entire month have included a team called the Indians, but are only hearing of this story--one involving 280 tribes--and consider what that reveals. Here’s what Keeler suggests: “No other ethnic group in the country is mascotted to the degree native people are, while simultaneously excluded from any other kind of portrayal.” Here’s your opportunity to find another image of this magnificent community beyond the sad face of Chief Wahoo.

We also brought along a new friend, Joyce, to share her take on being a Cleveland fan since moving to the city ten years ago. Plus, our old friend, Dr. Louis Moore, to gave us a primer on race in the World Series, past and present.

Leadoff Hitter: Longform that lays off the first pitch.

chief-wahoo-cleveland-indians-poster

Foul and Fair: How did you start protesting Chief Wahoo?

Jacqueline Keeler: I was born in Cleveland and my parents were part of a native community very active in getting rid of Chief Wahoo.

I didn't really confront the mascot issue until attending Dartmouth. Dartmouth’s mascot used to be the Indians but after they started recruiting native students in the early 70's, the team name and logo became contentious.

When I got there my freshman week, they gave away free Dartmouth Indian shirts to all the freshman. This van just started throwing them out at everyone. My roommate, who is white, took one.  I tried to explain to her why it was wrong and it was really strange that she just could not seem to grasp why it was offensive. It was the first time I really encountered the way mascotry works on people. My roommate could not grasp the mascot’s offensiveness to my culture.

FF: Why do you find offensive about Chief Wahoo?

JK: It is by far the most grotesque caricature of a native person in sports. I coined this term mascotry, because mascots have an effect well beyond the game. Some will say "You opposed this native mascot and look how handsome he is. Why do you have a problem with it?" or "The name isn't so bad!"  But, here’s the issue: having a mascot gives people the permission to indulge in a stereotype about native people and to act them out in real life.Once all people know is the stereotype, it masks the lived realities of native people.

There's no balance in the media. You don't have modern Native American families on television with their own TV series. You don't see native people as news anchors. When I meet other Americans, and I tell them I'm Native American, often the first they tell me is "Wow i didn't know you even existed. You're the first Native American I met."

It's still pretty crazy that when I tell people that I'm from here, they say, "No, originally," because for them, I can't be from here if I don't look white. That's the extent to which native people have been erased from this continent. It's a product of genocide and it’s why it's so horrific when that people parade in the culture that is akin to trophyism. As if [white Americans] defeated these people. Now they can take what they want from them and wear them and dress themselves up in the worst stereotypes of our culture.

There are 2,000 high schools that have Native American mascots. How would that complicate your life? What added level of misunderstanding would it add to your relationships with your peers? What kind of burden would it put on your educational process?

Studies have shown that mascots reduce the self esteem of native youth and increase stereotyping from whites. If that’s true, it works against building a healthily multiethnic and  multicultural America. I don't think the human brain can handle mascotry. It's done purely for entertainment value, It demands such a big price from the most vulnerable population in the country.

FF: How should Cleveland and other sports teams alter their logo and team name to dignify Native American heritage?

JK: I’m sure they could come up with something that’s more meaningful to them. Emory University researchers studied colleges which gave up Native American mascots and found that after two years of changing their mascots, schools had greater fan participation. Emory researchers surmised that having a native mascot cost the school in fan participation. According to their estimates, the Cleveland Indians lose $1.8 million dollars per year due to their mascot.

FF: Cleveland was in the World Series twice in the 90’s and one win away in 2007. Are people paying more attention this now? If so, why?

JK: Social media. My organization Eradicating Offense In Native Mascotry launched the hashtag #NotYourMascot during the 2014 Super Bowl in 2014 and we trended it nationally. We began tangling with the owner of Washington DC’s  football team, getting him to trip up and say stupid things (laughs) culminating with me working with the producers of The Daily Show to release an episode profiling the team and their fans.

We don’t want to just get rid of mascots--we want to replace them with images of natives as we know them to be. Even though we're only one percent of the country, when we all work together we can be heard.

FF: Is this the most #problematic World Series ever?

Lou Moore: Certainly every World Series before 1947—the Dodgers had two black players on their WS team in 1947—were problematic because they were segregated. But if we just look at this series, we have to agree that seeing the Indians mascot is a major problem, especially with the military oppression of native peoples going on right now.

FF: Tell us about how integration played out for these teams.

LM: After MLB integrated, Cleveland was ahead of most other teams. They brought in Larry Doby just three months after Jackie Robinson made his debut. A year later, they signed Satchel Paige, then Luke Easter. The consistently had black players on their team, and were a model club for diversity. The Cubs, however, delayed for as long as they could and missed the boat on several talented black players until they signed Ernie Banks in 1953. For black Americans in Chicago, this was a problem, because  they already felt unwanted on the North Side to begin with and Chicago had a rich history of black baseball.

 

FF: When, if at any point, did you become uncomfortable with the mascot and nickname? How come? What led to that?

Joyce Huang: I was never comfortable with the mascot and the name. In fact, I did a group project in college about racist logos and the Cleveland Indians/Chief Wahoo was our focus. As I learned more about the pain that Native Americans faced, it became very clear to me that I couldn't support the mascot. Since then, I haven't bought any Indians gear at all, though I would consider buying the block C in support of a logo change.

FF: How do you think the organization should respond?

JH: The fans here range from clueless about Chief Wahoo (i.e. they've heard it's racist but have no idea why) to adamant and perhaps even aggressive. It's interesting - my husband and I have had discussions on this as Cleveland transplants. There's a part of Cleveland that is rapidly changing and evolving as our industries and attitudes change, with new people, domestic and global, moving here... but at the same time, there's a part of Cleveland that has stuck to tradition and 'the way things were' even at the expense of its future, like with manufacturing. When I first moved here about 10 years ago, I felt like all around me, parts of Cleveland were just stuck in the 60s and 70s. And I think that may be part of the attitude around Chief Wahoo - sticking to something that is tradition because it's what they have left to hold onto. Unfortunately, that happens to be an extremely offensive logo. You can't escape the iconic scenes of Major League with Charlie Sheen wearing the Chief Wahoo cap.

It's actually quite divisive - I hear people from the younger generation (and some older) saying they could never fully, 100% be on board with the Indians as long as Chief Wahoo exists. Then, you have a very large contingent of people who say they would disavow their baseball team if Chief Wahoo went away. The organization is caught in the middle and indebted to their fan base - though Shapiro didn't like it and started to phase in the block C, he still thought fans should have the right to wear it.

I think this can be done several ways, but it will be against the will of the fans and the organization - MLB or federal fines for using logos, federal or state legislation, etc. I think the only way fans might stop wearing the logo is if there's some rumor that it's cursed. Haha.

 

Delay of Game: All you can read before the clock expires.

Hope my boss likes our protest. Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and other stars released an NBA-produced, one minute TV spot about, well -- they don’t really say. They do implore viewers to “listen to each other,” “figure it out,” and “use the game we love as a bridge.” They do show some teammates locking arms during the national anthem. They also narrate their platitudes over footage of a cop playing pick-up hoops with some “at-risk,” “disadvantaged,” “underprivileged,” youth. You know, urban.

Absent from the video is any specific criticism or interrogation of why we don’t listen to each other and what we need to figure it out, and how the officer using the game he loves as a bridge would be held accountable by his criminal justice system if he shot and killed one of those kids while they were playing in the park.

This is a one minute video, so much of our gripes are obviously beyond its scope. But what is clear is that the NBA has framed this kind of public stance on the issues, in part because it its top brass does not want its players copying Kaepernick. Bleacher Report spoke to a few stars, as well as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, about the league-approved activism taking a very different form than Colin Kaepernick’s open defiance.

There remains value to the anthem protests, several players said. But no one who spoke to B/R Mag indicated NBA players would follow suit. In the preseason, many NBA players instead chose to lock arms during the anthem—a display of awareness and togetherness, not protest.
“He’s done it,” Anthony said of Kaepernick. “He was courageous enough to do that. He created that. He created the kneeling and that protest. And people fell in line with that. Some people supported it. Some people didn’t. But at the end of the day, and I’m not taking nothing away from him...I just don’t think the gesturing is creating anything. I think it’s bringing awareness, but I think doing stuff and creating awareness in the communities [is more effective].”

Then Silver, referencing Anthony, Dwyane Wade, CP3 and LeBron James’statement at the 2016 ESPYs:

“These guys put themselves in a leadership position,” Silver told B/R Mag. “So when they see sort of symbolic gestures by athletes in other sports, and not to devalue them in any way, I think their view is: We’ve moved past that stage already. … We will be judged by the substantive actions we’re taking in our communities.”

Meanwhile, a black artist set to sing the anthem at the Philadelphia 76ers home opener wore a shirt reading “WE MATTER.” before her scheduled performance. Team security forbade her from entering the court. Because the league has moved past “symbolic gestures”, though, to be clear, they do not devalue them in any way.

Baseball’s whiteness: feature or bug? Okay, that’s probably an essay for another day but here’s this sentence taken from a worth-your-time-piece on the Cubs’ contribution to baseball’s color line:

Cap Anson’s effort to make baseball all white — which, disturbingly, didn’t deter us from fondly calling it America’s pastime — became the game’s hallmark for more than half a century: 60 years. But forreal, y’all? Do we really think that we can segregate a game for decades, desegregate it, and then pretend it shouldn’t matter in its current integration problems? 

*Wishful thinking, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.*

Also, when a nostalgic and sentimental baseball lover wants to tell you that the sports’s not white because look on the field, this rebuttal has the charts and data man!

Finally, from The New York Times:

Do you still dream of being a manager? I ask because this 55-year-old man is a 15-year minor league manager with a winning record and multiple titles to his name. He has won four Manager of the Year Awards in the minors. Then he moved upstairs with the San Diego Padres and won three organizational awards for excellence in player development.

He whistles softly. “I mean, I haven’t thought about it for a while,” he said. “As the years go by, you kind of put it on the back burner. But I’m not going to say the door is closed.”

I have left out a salient detail here: Jones is a black man.

Kap’s Cross to Bear. How does justice get accomplished? How do you get things done? How do you do the work? How do you move from kneeling on the sidelines to making boards and executives squirm? This is Kap’s new target for his activism, notes The Undefeated. And it’s not getting any easier.

High-profile black athletes like Kaepernick have to take the protest into boardrooms and executive suites. They must force the teams for whom they play, apparel companies that they represent, to hire and promote African-Americans as well as place them on their boards. They must insist that their teams and the large manufacturing companies they do business with do so with an ever-widening network of black vendors. This is not public work and it’s not sexy, but athlete-activists can use their increased visibility to raise the question of economic inclusion and use their leverage to force the answer.

The cost of Gold. Possibly the most famous people in gymnastics, Bela and Marta Karolyi are the subject of a damning new civil suit. A former US national team member has alleged that the all-star couple (naturalized citizens originally from Hungary) "turned a blind-eye to Nassar's sexual abuse of children at the ranch" and "instituted a regime of intimidation and fear at the ranch for the minor children under their custody." ESPN deep dive here.

Best Fans in Baseball (Are Those of Cards’ Chief Rival). On Twitter, she goes by Shake Arrieta, but both her teams are playing in the World Series. “It feels kind of lonely sometimes when you're a black woman who loves baseball and I know that it's not really that way, so I started seeking out others and found them." Meet Shakeia Taylor, who brought nearly 20 women from all racial backgrounds to Wrigley Field last year.

And meet Caitlin Swieca, whose decision to donate $10 to the Illinois-based Domestic Violence Legal Clinic has turned into a $20,000-plus movement, #pitch4dv. After the Cubs acquired Aroldis Chapman, who was suspended for the first 30 days of the season because of claims of domestic violence, Swiecachanneled her disappointment into advocacy.

“I had a pit in my stomach the first few times Chapman pitched for the Cubs, but as the social media response to the campaign grew, I stopped dreading it so much,” Swieca told Sports Illustrated. “Every save reminded me how many fans out there are not okay with his presence on the team.” (Here you go, if you feel compelled to donate.)


Are we in Believeland? Say what you will about the Indians’ landing home field advantage, but the fact that beat writers spent additional days in Cleveland, rather than Chicago, made for some poignant reporting from a hard-hit Rust Belt city. As Grant Brisbee points out in this lovely testament to the Mistake on the Lake, when the Indians last won the World Series, the city was the 6th largest in America. Today, it’s the 51st. Savor its (white) people--surely Ohio has sports fans of color, national sports writers--their forgivable cynicism, their puzzled bliss. But also wonder why years go by in parts of the country without us asking why we overlook them.

What’s in a name? Were the Cleveland Indians named for 19th century Native American ballplayer Louis Sockalexis? Oh well it’s complicated. But it’s pretty clear that Cleveland’s association with Native Americans came from its association with Sockalexis, who was victimized by racial slurs and racist remarks by opposing fans. It’s all very messy, but Joe Posnanski is not afraid of going there.

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If you liked this and ironed on $28 worth of fabric letters onto a $7 t-shirt to gift your favorite player with a shirt suggesting his fun-loving personality, you saw him on television wearing it, and it spawned a hundred-of-thousand dollar (all for charity) t-shirt craze, party at Napolis!

Damn, what a good story. Make ours even better by liking our Facebook pageand following us on Twitter. Tell your friends to subscribe at foulandfair.com.

Morgan and Bradford

Trump, the Cubs, and other things destined for failure this November.

Hi friends,

Forgive the pissy headline.

Nothing’s guaranteed. Nope, not a Giants’ three-run lead with three outs to go. (My heart.) Not a 3-1 NBA Finals’ lead with two series clinchers at home (My heart again.) Not Cam Newton’s dominance—just nine months after losing all of one time last season, his Panthers dropped to 1-4 on Monday. Oh, and he has barely anything to say about anything important these days.

Meanwhile, Colin Kaepernick learned earlier this week that on Sunday he will finally throw his first pass for the San Francisco 49ers since 2015. For most Niners fans, the move feels far overdue. But who knew that in his months of bench warming, Kap would be featured on the cover of Time Magazine and ignite a movement in his league, in high school sports, and around the greater sports world, all without making a single completion? My word.

Conor Gillaspie. Ever heard of him? Me neither. Jk. Drafted by the Giants the same year as star catcher Buster Posey, and ahead of the current Gold Glove winner, shortstop Brandon Crawford. Hit the 3-run homer that sent the Giants’ to the NLDS, blew an Aroldis Chapman save on Monday, drove another one run on Tuesday. If he’s like any other Giants’ hero of the past six years (Travis Ishikawa comes immediately to mind), he won’t make the Opening Day roster and he won’t be in the organization come September.

Enjoy F&F folks. Sports are trash. I love sports.

- Morgan

Delay of game.

More thorns in the Rose trial. The best point guard in New York plays in Brooklyn. (We’ll get to him in a moment.) The most expensive point guard plays for the Knicks, which I wish I could say is the worst part of their Derrick Rose trade. As you probably know, Rose was accused of gang-raping a woman in 2013, and so, has missed his last two preseason games with the Knicks defending himself in his civil rape trial.

Rose, who has not demonstrated a shred of understanding about the nature of consent during the trial-- that’s not editorializing, he was unable to provide a definition during a deposition -- spent this week explaining why he brought the condom used during their sexual encounter with him, claiming that the NBA instructs rookies to ensure they don’t leave their condoms behind. (When Doe’s attorney asked Rose about his condom disposal, Rose  “You never know what women are up to nowadays”).

Also, Randall Hampton, a friend of Rose and defendant in the civil trial, testified on Tuesday. He clarified a number of discrepancies between his version of the night of and Rose’s. In Hampton’s response: Rose “has trouble remembering things.” Thanks for clearing the air!

This isn’t even close to the worst update. Rose is under criminal investigation -- it’s one reason his accuser has thus far, kept her anonymity. Nadine Hernandez, one of the LAPD detectives investigating the incident, died from a gunshot wound. Examiners have yet to determine whether Hernandez’s death was a suicide as it was initially identified in the 911 call, or a homicide. It is tragic all the same.

The anonymity we referenced earlier may not have happened without Hernandez. Her letter to Jane Doe’s attorney urged the judge to keep Doe’s name out of litigation, not merely to help her criminal investigation, but for the accuser’s benefit. As she framed it, anonymity offers “great comfort to victims of crimes of such a sensitive nature.” Rest in power, Nadia.

Growing Linterest in racial justice. Back to the good point guard. Jeremy Lin was interviewed during last weekend’s New Yorker Fest where he shared some interesting thoughts about his Asian American identity in light of the recent Kap and Carmelo-led protests against police violence. Many Asians struggle to see their position in a civil rights struggle that tends to be framed in a black-white binary, so having one of the most popular and beloved Asian American public figures wrestle with that publicly was noteworthy:

 
 
 
 

According to filmmaker and journalist Ursula Liang, Lin went on to note that the worst racism he experienced was at Dartmouth, Columbia, Yale, and all the other Ivy League schools he destroyed during his remarkable Harvard basketball career. If nothing else, competing against racist nerds, playing in the shadow of Kaepernick’s protest, and having a lot of black co-workers and friends is pushing Lin to consider how he can against anti-black racism.

America: “A Beautiful Girl You Have to Ignore.” There’s few things lucrative about the athlete’s life in Cuba. And much of the island’s romance has been over mythologized by commercial-weary Americans hoping for a nostalgic paradise. Yet the Obama administration’s decision to restore relations Cuba suggests that the island may soon bare little resemblance to the contradictory Communist state it is today. Read Brin-Jonathan Butler’s meandering essay on the death of an era and remember: “With the first of over a million slaves brought to Cuba in 1520, today human beings are still being bought and sold as commodities, desperate to make it across the Gulf Stream, the most powerful and dangerous current on earth.”

Does Tom Brady still back Trump?

Um.

 
 

Baseball Diversity Digest

  • Baseball has a Latino manager again, thanks to the White Sox for hiring Rick Renteria. The Mexican-American skipper formerly managed the Cubs. This is admittedly anecdotal, but it’s nice to see a brown manager get a second chance, especially considering how his last job ended. All you struggling workers that for no apparent reason, got fired or dismissed in favor of a white man, then watch that man receive all the credit: There’s hope for you!
  • Korea Can Make (American) baseball fun again. This amazing article taught me about a leaping bunt or “frog jump bunt,” a bat flip that hit an umpire, what happened to a washed up former Giants pitcher, how the complexities of the Japanese/Korean relationship show up in baseball, that Korean pitchers take off their hats and bow if they hit veterans, and why young people find baseball games an emotional release. Now if only MLB wanted to learn from other cultures. Paging Rob Manfred. (Thank you, Mina Kimes.)
  • Nicknames are for the Birds. Blue Jays’ play-by-play announcer Jerry Howarth doesn’t refer to Cleveland’s baseball team as the Indians. Why? Because Howarth opened himself to being moved by a gracious and moving letter from a First Nations’ fan sent over 20 years ago. Deadspin with interesting context. Check out #NotYourMascot. Hall of Fame pitcher and TBS analyst Pedro Martinez didn’t get the memo about Chief Wahoo. (PS: Please watch the ALCS. Both teams are incredible and deserve better than the worst ratings in a decade. Thanks.)

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