In Which I Teach Martin Brady A Little Something About Baseball

Via Brittney, Martin Brady bemoans the fact that women move about freely in society  and thus threaten to ruin baseball. 

You just have to go read it for yourself.  It’s worth it, believe me.  The whole thing is hilarious.  But here’s the best part:

Women masseuses in the dugout? Next the head trainer will be a woman. Then the third-base coach. Then the manager. Meanwhile, the minor leagues will be forced legally to put women on the field. Don’t doubt that any of this can’t happen. In the past 40 years, our society has seen the unmitigated ascendance of women in all social and employment realms. Legislation has been enacted to protect—and also to encourage—their insinuation into once-male-dominated domains. Have you watched television lately? Aside from ESPN, with its mostly (but certainly not all) male talking heads, women are everywhere in places of media prominence. On any given night, a typical local network affiliate will have an all-female team handling anchor, weather and sports duties. What are the men who used to have those jobs doing now? Working at day-care centers?

 

My god!  He’s right.  Women are everywhere and we’re ruining everything and, worse than that, when we take men’s jobs, we force them to get really gross jobs like raising children!

I want to call Brady hysterical, just for the fun of it, but I’m worried he wouldn’t get the joke.

Anyway, Brady, here’s what I want to tell you about baseball: Baseball is not about your penis.  Baseball is not some holy sanctuary for men who feel oppressed by the presence of women.  Baseball is a business.

Baseball’s business is making money.

If baseball teams find that the best personnel they can get for the money are women, they will hire women.  If those women then stand in the dugout or near third base, as a business, baseball could not give a shit–even if individuals raise a stink.  And believe me, if there is a woman out there who can consistently throw a ball at near 100 miles an hour in the strike zone, some team is going to give her a shot, whether you like it or not.

Is baseball ever going to be overrun with women?  I doubt it.  But a day is going to come when there will be a handful of female major league players.  If they’re good enough to compete with the men and cheap enough to make it worth the teams’ while, it’s going to happen.

If you don’t like it, start your own league.  Set your own rules.  Make it a he-man woman-hater’s club if you want.  That’s your business. 

But don’t expect baseball to keep the girls out just because you find them ooky.  Don’t complain about them making business decisions that don’t reinforce your notion of the aesthetic meaning of baseball.  That just doesn’t make sense and it’s hateful.

In order to show you how idiotic you sound, I did a little find and replace.  Here’s some of what you wrote with the gender stuff changed to race:

Hernandez, in a moment of pure and (God love him) thoughtless honesty, was only striking a blow for a bigger cause: Whites’ right to have their games and to play them in the sanctity of blessed whiteness. The dugout is only an extension of the locker room, which is where whites change their clothes, shower, scratch, fart, belch, and otherwise act like white guys. Is the right to act like a white guy in danger of being legislated out too?

Listen, it’s not whites’ fault that the games they play are cool and executed at the highest physical level, and that blacks want to intrude. There’s been such a fuss over Title IX funding for so many years, and blacks got their way with that. Their opportunities to play sports have increased tremendously, and more than ever blacks are making livings throughout the sports world. The encroachment of blacks into American sports is unprecedented. And, no, we shouldn’t be surprised that the San Diego Padres have a black massage therapist working out the kinks of a third-baseman’s strained hammy.

Does anyone really think that Keith Hernandez, a guy who’s been around the block a few times, was making some kind of statement about where blacks belong in society? I think not. My guess is that Keith has a handle on the big picture. Which is, that whites, just like blacks, are entitled to their own competitive worlds, their own oneness of race, their own privacy, their own camaraderie, their own right to express themselves at a unique personal level, and, most of all, to behave freely as whites. The major league baseball dugout has always been a place where these things have been allowed to happen. Kelly Calabrese’s presence raises a potential red flag signaling the end of all that, and yes, whites have a right to be concerned.

There isn’t a damn thing wrong with Hernandez speaking his mind. It’s a free country, isn’t it? He’ll have to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous PC fortune, of course, and hell, I don’t even care that he had to issue a PC-inspired statement to cover his ass.

Would you even write that?  I doubt it.  But if you can see how much that line of thinking sucks, then why can’t you see how much your line of thinking sucks?  If a person can do the job and do it well, she should be allowed to do it.  If you want to critique Calabrese, critique her on her ability to do her job, not on whether or not she’s ruining baseball with her girl cooties.

Things I Like About You, Gentlemen

1.  I’m a little in awe of how strong and open some of you are.  It’s not a kind of masculinity I’m very familiar with–strong, open, up-front honesty that feels agenda-less.  But I like it and I always feel very honored to be in its presence.  There are a couple of you, specifically, who, I think, inherently get what it means that strength is as much about making the people around you feel safe as it is about being able to kick ass, even if you claim that you don’t.

2.  I also feel very honored that you often disagree with me… okay, regularly disagree with me and still come back for more.  I pick on you, but I learn so much from you.  I really hope you get that.

3.  I’m amazed at how generous you are with yourselves.  We hear so much about how men don’t share things, they don’t express their feelings, etc.  With y’all, I don’t find that to be the case.

4.  Y’all are some funny motherfuckers and smart.  Again, we often hear about how knowledge lately is all vertical, that people know as much as there is to know about their little corner of the world and have no knowledge or interest in other things.  But you guys make me feel connected to people who are connected to the world.

5.  Even though I suspect that most of you hate all the feminist talk, and I know, because you won’t shut up about it, that you really do believe that this is just how things are and women just need to learn to suck it up, you make me feel hopeful that things between us in the future will be better than they were in the past and better than they are now.

So, thanks.

Also, you have magnificent penises.  Each and every one of you.  Now that I have the car back, I’ve spent a lot of time driving around and peeping in your windows, so I know what I’m talking about.

The Rash and Its Friend, The Other Rash

Did I ever tell you guys about my triumphant arrival at grad school?  As you may recall, I was fleeing for my life from a small town newspaper and my parents’ house and moving to North Carolina to get my MA in English.  I ended up writing my thesis on experimental electronic writing.

Ha, that’s kind of funny.  Doesn’t seem so experimental now, does it former self?*

But this was long before that.  In fact, it was before classes had even started.  My dad had come down with me to help me move in and the apartment was all settled and we were in the laundry room doing laundry when we ran out of quarters.

I said, “I’ll run down to Kroger and get some.”–the Kroger being right down a small hill directly in back of the apartment complex.  Halfway down the hill, I lost my footing and fell and slid down the rest of the hill.  I felt like a doofus, but I didn’t seem hurt, so I got up, walked to Kroger, got the quarters, walked back and told my dad how hilarious it was that I’d slid down the hill.

We finished up, went out to dinner and halfway through dinner my ankle hurt so bad I thought I was going to throw up.  I looked down and there was a softball sized lump on the side of it.

We went to the emergency room and they looked at my ankle and x-rayed it and had a loud discussion about whether or not to go ahead and break it to relieve some of the pressure.  This talk also made me want to throw up.  Eventually, they decided not to break it and I was sent off to a foot and ankle dude.

He gave me a regimen of hot and cold baths, exercises, and a boot like something Darth Vader would wear.  This was bad enough, having to meet all my new colleagues and wander around a new campus and such with a huge boot on my foot.

But I also had poison ivy.  It covered my feet, both my calves and ran up my thighs and, on the right side, right up my right butt cheek–pretty much covering every place that had touched the ground when I’d fell.

This was also very bad. And embarrassing.  And itchy.

But then, I started to get all these tiny bubbles all over my hands and up my neck and on my face.  The looked like tiny albino clumps of grapes.  And they also itched.  So, one half of me was covered with red puss-leaking scabby poison ivy nonsense and the other half of me was covered in tiny itchy blisters.  And I had a giant boot on.

I was not pretty.

And try sleeping.

Not pretty and tired and grouchy.  What a great first impression I made!

So, back to the doctor I went for some relief at least from some part of it.  “Doc, at least, tell me what the itchy blisters are.”

“Well, Aunt B., you appear to be having some kind of allergic reaction to the poison ivy rash.”

“I’m allergic to an allergic reaction?”

“In layman’s terms, yes.”

I’m sorry, folks, but that just cracks me up whenever I think about it.  And I’m glad it’s never happened again.

 

 

*Yes, I think I did just talk some smack to myself.

Well, this is weird

I have to admit, having the Butcher around in the evenings is weird.  He watches things on TV I don’t, like Rambo.  And he falls asleep on the remote.

Still, he looks very cute over there cuddled up with one of the pillows and using another one as a blanket.

It’s a good thing I’m such a good person, because a lesser woman would be over there with a Sharpie or a warm glass of water.