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.