Anthony Bass's pitching should be so performative! Blue Jays mislead by positing that prejudice can go away in just 10 days.
Unlearning tribalism that shapes a worldview takes more than a week and half. Also: a Cito Gaston historical talking point, and new recurring features.
Perhaps the Toronto Blue Jays posited that all the wildfire smoke could be cleared by the booing that will occur when Anthony Bass takes the field.
Whelp, can you think of a better explanation for why my first and most enduring sporting love galaxy-brained its observance of Pride Weekend into expediting an unearned redemption arc for a hate-mongering marginal MLB reliever? The Jays, all of 10 days after Bass did harm and encouraged harm against people who are 2SLGBTQIA+ by sharing that video that called selling Pride-themed merchandise “demonic,” agreed to his offer to “participate in the proceedings” with community activist leZlie Lee Kam.
Bass’s pitching should be so performative! Really, it should.1
In some of the least shocking news on Thursday that did not involve an indictment, of course, Bass said, “I do not” think that the video he shared is hateful. That betrayed that this is dead-arsed damage control, and fans should rightly reject it.
The Blue Jays, and Bass, are asking 2SLGBTQIA+ leaders and longtime supporters who try to be allies in our (hopefully endearingly) clumsy way to put them over. It might be good for brand protection and for crisis communications. I cannot speak to how people whose identity is not cisgender and/or heteronormative are receiving it. They can speak for themselves, and one must stand with them. This is more about the ballclub, a quasi-public trust, insulting the intelligence of Blue Jays fans who flock to the thinking person’s summer game.
The progenitor of severe gluteal discomfort here is, ironically, the sin of pride from Bass and the enablers. That group includes but is not limited to club president Mark Shapiro, general manager Ross Atkins, field manager John Schneider, and the benevolent behemoth that is Rogers Communications. They are lollygagging their way through adapting to social change only on their terms. They are pandering to the part of their fanbase who lollygag their way through unpacking the insecurities that are at the root of homophobia and transphobia.
What does that make them, Larry? Lollygaggers!
My vantage point is that of your basic — the most basic! — heteronormative ginger sports-fanatic manchild who lives by two separate but equally important credos. The first is Eugene V. Debs’s “I am in it” epigram, cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut; the second is “No Ragrets.”2
Here it is: unlearning whatever tribalism that one grew up with as a child and teen, and whatever bubble of young adulthood you found yourself in takes time and effort. You might even, here is a word that you never hear in sports, call it a big-P Process. What is in someone’s heart and head does not evolve in just 10 days. It takes time, reflection, and work. I was probably 40 years old by the time I realized I did not know the first thing about being an ally.
Another piece of this is that value of giving the benefit of the doubt also took an L in this debacle. There is no readily public evidence that Bass has any clarity that he can have his faith and still accept that people who are 2SLGBTQIA+ are fully human and that drag is as old as the performing arts itself. One would hope someone explained to him that the same baseless aspersions being cast in 2023 are the same ones that were hurled 50 years ago. Hate-mongering just works to get subtler with each generation.
Bass, doubtlessly, should have been gone like the wind. That discussion, like the wildfire smoke, might have shifted away. It is about the polished glibness of the Blue Jays hurting the cause.
At least the actual Jays took 3-of-4 against the Houston Astros and pocketed a tiebreaker advantage they might need on the first of October.3 So there is that.
Cito Gaston and Cooperstown
With Houston playing the Jays this week, one-time SportsLit guest Steve Simmons sought out Astros manager Dusty Baker to affirm that Cito Gaston has a place in the story of baseball that merits a Baseball Hall of Fame plaque.
Gaston, as you know, is the first and only African-American manager to guide a modern MLB team to two World Series titles in a row. He steered the ship when the Jays went back-to-back in 1992-93. At the time, he was only the fourth African-American manager in the American and National leagues, and the NFL had just added only its second African-American head coach since its re-integration in 1946.4
And, as Simmons emphasizes, he is the only African-American baseball manager, NBA head coach, or NFL head coach whose teams won more than one title.
Every baseball manager of the last 100 years who led a team to consecutive World Series titles is in the Hall of Fame. The unseen hand is that Gaston never got to manage another MLB team outside of Canada. A personal belief, as I wrote for The Comeback in 2021, is that there is a bit of payback for the Blue Jays being something less than a hardline organization during the 1994-95 strike.
Baseball, after losing a World Series, went through with the sham of using replacement players during spring training in 1995. They were prepared to use them in the regular season until Sonia Sotomayor, the present-day U.S. Supreme Court justice, ordered the restoration of the previous collective agreement so there could be a season with real major leaguers.
The Blue Jays had excused Gaston from having to manage a fakey team that spring. The Detroit Tigers also excused the late great Sparky Anderson from managing a fakey team.
Anderson handled the Tigers that season and then was not renewed contractually. He was only 61 years old, and he never managed again.
The Blue Jays and Gaston parted ways late in the ’97 season. It took a decade for him to get back in the dugout — once again, with the Blue Jays — despite the mantle of skippering two World Series-winning teams.
It has always seemed odd. It is not that I necessarily believe there was any collusion not to hire Cito Gaston, or that he does not have agency in why he never managed another team. Piling up the career stats counts for a lot in surviving the test of time in baseball, and Gaston ended up with a 10-season gap in his baseball CV.
New features!
Nothingburger of the week: the CFL accountin’ for talent
Far be it to say the froth about a new CFL roster rule that will put more American players on the field is overblown. Or that the opposition to this rule seems to argue for equality of outcomes when improving equality of opportunities for Canadian and international players is where the CFL should be pressed.
Long story short, the import ratio in the CFL is one of those byzantine bits you do not need to know in order to exist as a casual fan, like salary caps and the balk rule. A certain number of players on the dress roster have to qualify as Canadians (or “nationals.”) Only a certain number may be American. Global players were added to the calculus.
National players must comprise at least seven of the 24 starters on defence and offence. In practice, give or take a unicorn such as Henoc Muamba or Andrew Harris, the seven Canadian starters almost always fill the same positions.
Three of the national starters, inevitably, play the centre and guard spots among the mostly anonymous mesomorphs on the offensive line. There are two more Canadian spots on the offensive side of the ball: a field-side wide receiver, who gets the fewest pass-catching opportunities, and a slotback and blocking back who rotate in and out depending on the formation.
The deep safety on defence is always a national player. A defensive tackle typically completes the CanCon septet. The league audits player participation to make sure teams meet the ratio at all times during a game.
The new tweak, basically, is that three designated Americans, so-called, can play up to 23 defensive or offensive snaps, in place of any Canadian. It took a hot minute for basically every team to find an accounting loophole. Basically, list actual starters as backups and sub them in on their unit’s second snap. They can replace any American. The nominal first-play-only starter can then replace the Canadians for up to 23 snaps.
I scrolled through a few depth charts just to see whether every team was doing it. Calgary did it on Thursday with feature back Ka’Deem Carey. British Columbia did so with star receiver Dominique Rhymes. Hamilton will do so with star receiver Duke Williams on Friday. Williams, a one-time 1,500-yard receiver with NFL experience, is the listed backup behind a rookie named Omar Bayless.
So what is the problem? The CFL is an entertainment product, and even if the rule is being bent, guys you might have heard of, or who played at a school that you know has a football team, will get more playing time. That increases the chance of seeing what one of the great university coaches, Pat Sheahan, calls explosion plays. I want those. I want to see Canadian success stories on the field too, and the team with the best Canadian talent usually wins the Grey Cup, but all of that should be earned on merit.
Canadian athletes in non-ice-based sports are just as good as Americans when they have the right training and support. The energy would be better spent on leaning into calling for the CFL to get invested in Canada improving its football infrastructure, where the U.S. is ahead of us by a century. The depth is nowhere near the same on a per-capita basis, although very good pros in both leagues — see Laurent Duvernay-Tardif going from McGill to winning a Super Bowl ring as a starting guard for Kansas City — come out of the U Sports ranks.
It is either that or drop the pretense. Firstly, take the compliment that much of the soul of the CFL is football people who are American by birth and culturally Canadian by choice. Secondly, look at the traditional ratio from the other side of it. How many people out there do not take the CFL seriously because of what is a quota system?
Another talking point I have not heard enough is that the CFL has been lapped by its ‘league that starts in C’ counterparts in basketball and soccer. Football is much more resource-intensive and involves much larger rosters, so it is not an entirely fair comparison.
The CEBL, though, is already built out to 10 teams and requires 75 percent of the players to be Canadian, compared to 46.7 percent in the CFL. In soccer, the Canadian Premier League is in the 70 percent Canadian range for the overall roster and requires 54.5 percent of the starters to be Canadian.
Those leagues quickly shot past a 65-year-old league that plays a code of football that marks its sesquicentennial in 2024.5 Go play with that in the backyard for a while.6
Neat-o stat of the week
Never let it be said that the New York Mets are not a favorite squadron for essay-length shitposters.
The Mets just blew leads of three runs or more in three consecutive losses. Thursday, they reverse-surmounted — dismounted? — from a four-run margin to lose in Atlanta on a walk-off home run in the 10th inning. Wednesday, Max Scherzer allowed two-out rallies in back-to-back innings to lose the lead. Tuesday, it took only one inning to fall behind. The obvious Seinfeld reference is obvious.
Or as Keith Olbermann once said: “Revoke the Mets franchise before it attains nuclear capability.” At least they did you a solid, Reader. The default for this space was very nearly a tortured simile about how J.P. Crawford, the dreadlock-sporting shortstop of the Seattle Mariners, is like Ted Danson’s old sitcom Becker.
Stuff said by successful smart people
“Just as the PGA Tour did, everyone else will capitulate … you already know this is hardly the end of (Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s) incursion into American sports.”
— Drew Magary, writing on Saudi Arabia’s “win in the golf wars”“We as (a) society are making such a grotesque fundamental tragic error in not regulating social media platforms and allowing disinformation to spread like a virus. The damage already done (is) immeasurable. Have been so ridiculously slow to act.”
— Troy Westwood, activist, former CFL kicker“Canadians deserve the truth. We deserve journalists who uphold the sacred trust we place in them. We deserve far better than what we have been receiving. And we need to demand better. Without our voices, nothing changes.”
— Norlaine Thomas, PhD (@norlaine)
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind. And please think about clicking for a free email subscription.
It’s been said many times. Mr. Unearned Redemption Arc has an earned-run average of nearly 5 runs per game, while having the least consequential usage of any Jays reliever.
Not one; not even a single letter.
Since MLB is all about casual fan engagement in October, there are no more one-game playoffs should two teams finish tied after 162 games for a division title or wild-card spot. The tiebreaker is the season-series result, and the Blue Jays finished 4-3 against the Astros.
The NFL was racially segregated from 1934 to ’45. The “forgotten four” who began competing in 1946 were Marion Motley and Bill Willis of the Cleveland Browns (then in the All-American Football Conference, a challenger league), and Woody Strode and Kenny Washington with the Los Angeles Rams.
That is 150 years, Bubba. Americans were playing soccer until McGill showed Harvard, in the spring of 1874, that the ball was meant to be carried.
Stop trying to force a catchphrase, Sags.