Sorry but teasing Team USA over handshakes is funny
And this semifinal between them and the Dominican Republic is going to rock.
I want you to try to remember the most competitive casual sporting event you ever played in. Or try to remember the most casual competitive event.
Maybe it was like an intense rec softball work league with the same teams over and over, including some you didn’t like. Or maybe it was an annual golf scramble put together by your local dive bar. Could be Seattle’s Monday Night Pinball league and one of your buddies plays on the other team your go-to spot hosts.
Before a big game, match or whatever, this guy you know on the other team says “Hey man, I know it’s a little weird, but please just don’t try to like shake my hand or dap me up. We decided as a group we’re not doing it so just, like, please…”
You would ABSOLUTELY go to shake this person’s hand. No question. I’d try so hard to shake their hand. And then after the game when asked I’d tease them about it some more.
Were I just knocked out of a tournament I cared a lot about by the team I thought was obnoxious? I might take it a smidge too far. Happens.
It’s kiiiiind of funny to have written a whole post about why I can’t do it with Team USA and the whole schtick before this whole saga went down.
That felt pretty political and it was intended to be pretty political, noting the unavoidable intersection of baseball nationalism and American militarism.
Randy Arozarena, the showman he is, just lit the fuse on a flare illuminating this whole thing and I can’t blame him for walking away afterwards. Because it is funny for how dumb it all is.
He’s back in camp and has issued his own statement. Once Cal’s back in camp, after whatever transpires over the next few days, I’m sure they’ll get over it. They’re big boys.
Cal’s original responding statement, for those that missed it, came with him wearing a T-shirt, seen above, featuring text from the front of a Claymore mine.
Robert O’Neill, the former Seal Team 6 member who makes his money now going around claiming he killed Osama bin Laden even though he didn’t, only shooting his dead body in the forehead enough for his skull to split open and brain matter to spill out, was wearing a similar shirt when he spoke in the Team USA clubhouse before their game against Canada.
Josh Naylor, being a normal dude who you would want to hang out with and not someone who would, say, describe people he didn’t like as “boys” he would make his “concubine”, kept the bit going during the game itself.
Because how can you not??? Look at these guys! They’re so deadly serious they brought in a troop to talk about how to really be deadly serious all while their manager loses track of what games they’re supposed to win and their pitching coach sounds wholly unprepared for the job at hand.
To borrow a term the redass baseball types enjoy using, it’s just so much eyewash. By being anti-showy, it’s showy in the worst way.
And it’s not what I, at least, want baseball to be. It’s not how I see baseball nor how I think most folks do.
I alluded to it in my last post on this, how the romanticized humble roots from which this game springs to life are now better found outside the country that originally authored ‘em.
Take The Players Tribune for what it is, but liked this bit from Fernando Tatis Jr. and whoever at TPT who ghost-wrote it:
I knew I was blessed to be raised with such a deep love for baseball, and the only way I knew to honor the game was to keep playing better, playing harder, and playing with the type of joy and excitement that’s hard to find anywhere except at those neighborhood ballfields in the D.R.
That type of baseball — our baseball — is unique. It’s not small. It’s not quiet. It’s a whole town shutting down to watch a game. It’s radios blasting Merengue típico between innings. It’s kids playing until the sun is so low that they can’t even see the ball anymore
When I was a kid, I was bad at baseball. Stopped playing in like third or fourth grade. I played a lot of catch before and after that, though. Even now still.
When I think about baseball in my childhood, I don’t think about games but of playing catch with a friend of mine in the park across the street from my house. His name was Al Beseler, he originally lived in the house next door to my grandma’s and he had a glove that was either his dad or his grandfather’s, one from the ‘40s.
He had a hell of an arm, too. I think it carried his high school team to state after our family had moved out to Seattle.
But years before that, we’d be out in that park—La Crosse, Wisconsin’s Weigent Park—playing long toss until it was dark, which in mid-summer was close to nine o’clock.
I’d wake up the next morning with my arm sore as hell, like a fast-pitch beer-league softballer who’d gone six strong.
I always liked that super old mitt Al had. I thought it’d be cool to play catch with and I don’t think I ever did.
I follow this guy on Twitter—or maybe it’s this guy’s business?—Jimmy Lonetti of DJ Glove Repair out of Minneapolis and I saw him post a refurbished glove he was selling that looked a bit like Al’s, or at least reminded me of his.
I reached out, asking if it was still for sale, eventually sending over my address but flaking on the conversation before we talked price and payment.
Still, a week or two later, a package I wasn’t expecting—and in it, the Hawthorne 60-4068 with Stan Musial’s signature branded into the palm.
I happily paid the very reasonable Paypal invoice that showed up in my inbox the same day.
The glove’s still my go-to. It’s in my bike bag right now after a cruise around the north side yesterday.
That is baseball.
It’s good to have love for the game, and that love is made better by sharing it with others—by reveling in it.
Life’s too short, this world is too tough to make more hostile by choice.
I’m sure Fernando Tatís’s San Pedro de Macorís is going to shut down tonight. Julio’s Loma de Cabrera, too.
The whole country, really.
Because what a game. This may mark the greatest collection of talent to play a competitive baseball game…ever?
How can you not enjoy it? How can you not smirk at the wonder of it all?
I hope Julio does go to shake Cal’s hand tonight. Because it’d be fun—and funny.
And then I hope he hits a fastball from Paul Skenes 450 feet to deep left.
Got some good memories in that building.
Something like this perhaps?