MLB Marketing: Let the kids play!
Some MLB players: Only on my team! Not against me!
It's difficult to even know exactly where to begin here because it's an argument that's been discussed for at least a couple of decades. For the most part, the old-schoolers have lost. Major League Baseball has even created a marketing campaign around telling the curmudgeons to settle down about players getting excited about making big plays. It started with this brilliant ad in front of last postseason, including Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr.
Look at all those players included in there. Basically, it's a group of incredibly exciting and marketable players that would appeal to young fans and help grow the game's popularity for the next generation of adult consumers. MLB's marketing department doubled down on the campaign heading into this season:
It's funny, for years fans on social media lament that MLB doesn't know how to market its players and that this campaign is the best job it has done. Look at all those marketable players being marketed! The best player in baseball closes with, again, "just let the kids play."
On Wednesday, MLB social media continued the campaign, such as with White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson's blast -- with a long toss of his bat which some would call excessive:
To be clear, Cut4 is a blog on MLB.com and the official MLB twitter account retweeted that. Later, this came from @MLB:
Now, this is social media and not directly coming from Rob Manfred or the MLBPA or anything, but it's got MLB's name on it and players have worked with the league to create the campaign.
The issue is everyone in MLB doesn't seem to be fully embracing this. Brad Keller of the Royals hit Anderson in his next at-bat and the benches cleared. So Keller and the Royals apparently aren't letting the kid play. What's funny is that pretty much every example - the Royals are just the flavor du jour here -- of stuff like this shows glaring hypocrisy. Some White Sox fans found and started circulating this on Twitter:
Now, the easy reply here from Royals fans would be that this was a walk-off and it's OK in that case. Something something "big spot." That game ran the Royals' record to 19-36. Anderson's home run Wednesday broke a scoreless tie. I mean, we can argue about this if we really want to and we'll just end up going in circles of semantics. Where we end up is somewhere in the ballpark of ...
My guys can do it, but no one else can.
It's just hard for people to admit that hypocrisy that's been ingrained, and it's understandable. Just because it's understandable, however, doesn't mean it should be accepted. We can self-evaluate and grow from it.
Remember the Jose Bautista bat toss? That was the biggest home run in Canadian history since Joe Carter's World Series clinching walk-off and people were still incredibly angry about it. It caused a fight the next year when Rougned Odor punched Bautista, and the pulse I got from social media was many fans of other teams were saying "good! He deserved it!"
There's still a fundamental disagreement here. MLB is trying to market to younger people while there's an element of curmudgeon that's sort of embodied in this tweet from Randal Grichuk:
Guys are getting a little excessive on pimping HRs, on meaningless HRs too. Act like you have done it before, one time.
— Randal Grichuk (@RGrich15) April 17, 2019
Lots of people are wired this way. My question back would be: Why? Why does a hitter have to act how you want him to act? You, Randal Grichuk, don't get to decide what is OK for Tim Anderson. You just don't.
What know what's a good phrase? To each his own. You don't have to flip your bat and celebrate, Randal, but in return, how about just letting Anderson be himself?
For the record, Anderson owned Grichuk:
