Quick, think of the last time you looked at a baseball player and thought, ‘Man, that guy is having a ton of fun right now.’ The last time you saw a professional hitter spontaneously express unrestrained emotion.
Was it immediately after he crushed a home run? Probably. It certainly was for Jose Bautista last night. So, naturally, after Bautista put the exclamation point on a solid Jays’ ‘W’, the hours after the game were spent analyzing his reaction to his home run and the Orioles’ reaction to his reaction, and the rest of the Jays’ reaction to the O’s reaction. All of which is…yeah, that’s baseball for you. There’s something about a homer—presumably that something being that it represents the perfect outcome for a batter—that inspires passion and exuberance and smiles and, if the vibe is right, trash talk and bat flips and “pimping.” (We’ll give Adam Jones the benefit of the doubt there and not take his word choice literally.)
If that expression of joy or anger or self-confidence is genuine and comes from the heart, then it’s wonderful, regardless of how disrespectful it might seem to opponents and their backers. Currently, much of fans’ relationships with the athletes they love is borne of stilted, mechanical, all-too-professional encounters. A two-question hit between periods. A crowded and uncomfortable post-game scrum or press conference. A carefully-vetted-by-their-agency essay on The Players Tribune. When a player shows a spark of genuine personality, he often literally wins himself hundreds of new fans—we’re that hungry to cheer for real people.
And if sports fans as a whole are hungry for real people and raw emotion, baseball fans are starving to death. The game, once the biggest sport in North America, has been losing ground to football for basically two decades straight. And yes, part of that is because of a shift towards more violent, action-packed sports. But certainly the staid and traditional manner in which every baseball player is encouraged, often quite strongly, to conduct themselves plays a role.
In what universe is it a good thing for the health of the game of baseball when one of its biggest and most marketable stars tells the media that he’ll no longer flip his bat and enjoy his home runs because he wants “to show American baseball that I’m not disrespecting the game”?
Yasel Puig’s bat flips, for the record, are extremely flamboyant, imbued with the sort of look-at-what-I-just-did-attitude that rubs a loud-but-shrinking group of stodgy baseball traditionalists the wrong way. They’re also amazing displays of sheer exuberance, fun to watch and among the most GIF-worthy moments of a sports fans evening.
“I don’t do that because I lack respect,” Puig says. “I do that because of the emotions that I have.”
So Puig has emotions. So does Bautista. But they shouldn’t show them too much on the field. It might endear them to the wrong type of fans. Fans who love a stylish celebration; fans who love when a player enjoys his work; fans who love it when an epic confrontation between two athletes ends with an exclamation point by the victor and a vow of revenge by the loser.
Perhaps most importantly, fans who are watching baseball simply because the NFL season hasn’t started yet. And we definitely don’t want to give those fans the kind of celebratory dances, poses and trash talk that they clearly love seeing on Sundays.
And this isn’t about the opposing players. It’s fine for Adam Jones to be angry that Bautista punked the Orioles after that home run. It’s OK for Yasiel Puig’s latest victim to glare at him after a bat flip. And if that pitcher wants to fist pump like Tiger Woods circa 2004 when Puig goes down swinging in his next at-bat, that’s cool, too. It’s not OK for anyone who wants baseball to succeed to discourage these players from celebrating their achievement with as much emotion as they’re feeling. Shutting down visible exuberance is just bad business for baseball.
Finally, put yourself in a much-less-important version of their cleats for a moment. Have you ever played baseball at any level? Ever hit a home run? Even in T-Ball? Ever fought through a dirty slash to score a goal in road hockey or caught a touchdown in a game of flag football with a defender pushing you around?
Upon achieving this feat, did you nod in a stately manner with a neutral expression, then put your head down and go back to work? Lord, I hope not. If you did, I don’t want to play sports with you. You’re boring. And I definitely don’t want to sit in the bleachers with you and hear about the unwritten rules and who’s breaking them. You’re ruining sports for me, not Yasiel Puig.