Dodgers over Doofus Culture, 4-1 | Way Late World Series wrap-up

At least the L.A. baseball empire showed their class, while the Yankees, and others, were showing something else.

At least baseball stood up for norms when the L.A. Dodgers’ Mookie Betts was assaulted by Yankees fans during the World Series.

It said, No, this is not something the media ecosystem can turn into humor so a person can have their five minutes of Internet fame. Ballplayers must feel free to try to go for a ball in a play without having spectators wrench and twist their limbs in a manner akin to two Yankees fans, season-ticket holder Austin Capobianco and John Peter, did to Betts during the game on Oct. 29 at Yankee Stadium — full stop.

Why is it worth bringing this up about two weeks later? Well, there was an eighth-formed thought in the queue at that time. It lodged while the players’ association got involved to force Major League Baseball’s hand to bar the fans who behaved idiotically. It stayed there as the Dodgers made an unprecedented comeback in the decisive Game 5 win.¹ ²

How the Dodgers took the series, and how the Yankees fell apart, reflected something larger in the culture. It showed the difference between knowing the details while staying hungry and humble, instead of falling into the shallow reality of Doofus Culture.

Unfortunately, there was an election, and Doofus Culture seemingly won that.

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What is Doofus Culture?

At this stage, there is no definitive definition for Doofus Culture. It is fused at the hip with the rise of extremism, and a scary amount of acceptance of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and kakistocracy.³

It shows its ass, all day, every day. It is hard to fight back against, but we need to for our humanity and grace.

That was what was endearing about the Dodgers. They are a high-payroll team, but they showed their class while the Yankees and others showed something that rhymes with that.

Doofus Culture is alluring since it sanctions acting detached from actions and consequences, always being on the offensive, and then playing butthurt when called out for double standards.

It might seem harmless. But when society becomes that atomized, then it is easier to not care about the people in Palestine, Yemen, and Ukraine, or in the tents in nearby parks whom capitalism, empire, and imperialism are treating as redundant.

Hey, we might be stuck with capitalism, but human rights still exist, and not everyone wants to just roll over for it. Doofus Culture is acting like you can do whatever you want so long as you can afford it. Sure, that is a central joke of Frank Reynolds’ character in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but that is a TV show that trades in Cope.

It is unhealthy and unhelpful. The Rest of Us are just supposed to go along with it or be called scolds and told u must be fun at parties.

(You get all that from baseball? — Ed. Reply: yes, I do.)

What does Doofus Culture look like in a sports fan? It is the type of fan who can come off like an overgrown 10-year-old. For instance, Capobianco looked like a pre-pubescent grabbing at Mookie Betts.

Generally, symptoms may include Shiny Object Syndrome. Substituting ‘ring counting’ for seriously assessing an athlete’s legacy — uh, greatness shines through in the struggle and willingness to win, not how much you won, since that is in the hands of the Fates. Side effects include outcome-based thinking. Other side effects include making taunt-y posts after the first game of the season.

Real fandom does not front-run, or clout-chase. It seeks out sports for the community and for belonging. Hey, there is a game. It reminds me of other games I have watched, and it helps me make sense of a complicated world. Everyone’s knowledge and experience should be valued, as long as that openness feels reciprocal. And it is not for sale, and the people who own the team and the broadcast rights cannot control it.

And people who pay attention are rewarded, and not mocked. And they share knowledge in the spirit that you do not hide your light under a bushel. Too flowery?

Doofus Culture is not limited to men. It just comes across through loud, wrong, impulsive, self-unaware behavior. Sometimes it is endearingly clumsy — think of former NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski and his second act as a media personality.

Oddly enough, Gronkowski indirectly pointed out where Capobianco got social sanction to be so un-stunningly stunted. He was a hockeybro. The day after, Gronkowski, a master of reading coverages, remembered that Capobianco was part of a group of “absolute maniacs” who played ACHA-level hockey at the University of Arizona.⁴ It is a pay-to-play club team.

No slight on that level of hockey, not knowing anything about it. There is just a difference between the hockey rink and the ballpark with acceptable forms of aggression. North American hockey got dragged down for 100-plus years by goonism. Baseball has its own role for menace, but goonism was never allowed in, with good reason.

Thankfully, the higher-ups in baseball upheld that. They gave this instance of Doofus Culture the heave-ho, even if many of their investors, team personnel, and players did support the de facto Putin-Musk-Netanyahu ticket.

Oh, but that is neither here nor there. Doofus Culture is just the social currency it requires, a kind of emotions-deadening, empathy-killing scrip. Hey, like Crypto?! Sure, if you want to draw that analogy.

That is the focus today. You can find your negative examples of it on your time if you agree. At street level, it is the private car operator revving their engine at a stoplight. In politics, it is a party with a leader such as Doug Ford, who picks fights over bicycle lanes and insists on building highways when everyone knows mass transit is the best way to move people around.

It is tied into the so-called manosphere and religious right. Both had a certain amount of pull in an election that also ties back to every parallel to 1930s Germany that historians have cited since 2016.

Canadian context: why does the Leader of the Official Opposition not have a security clearance? As we mark Remembrance Day, is anyone credible asking what Canada will do if an outta-NATO United States decides it needs fresh water from a nation with 95,000 military personnel to its 2.079 million?

I know, I know, stick to sports.

Those two sweet Yankees fans might not deserve to be dragged into it. They might be, for all anyone knows, leading a chapter of World Central Kitchen or working for Doctors Without Borders. Hey, it very well might have been a performance art piece to interfere with Mookie Betts, and then tell ESPN, “We're not going to go out of our way to attack. If it's in our area, we're going to 'D’ up.

“Someone defends, someone knocks the ball. We talk about it. We're willing to do this.”⁵

Either way — hard no! This is not ’Nam, a polling place that just got a bomb threat, a stump speech where the sitting U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris is called “trash” and “Jezebel,” a social media site where people claim Haitian immigrants eat house pets, or that chaplains are banned from Remembrance Day ceremonies.⁶

This is baseball. There are rules. There is a universal truth.

At least these two were marked as zeroes. The point is, it is hard to watch boorishness get excused and rewarded after, personally, affirming that living modestly and speaking firmly is mentally healthful.

It matters since life management and good governance exist in the details. People who are loud, wrong, struggle with emotional regulation, and carry a certain pride in ignorance should not be handed the keys.

Starting fires and/or expecting someone else to clean up their mess is not delegation. And yet that is in abundance, especially in Canada. At least three provinces — Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan — have a ruling group that has forgotten they are not official opposition to the prime minister and their party.

Keeping this on baseball, the Dodgers scored one for playing the right way on all sides of the ball. They were tough in the face of a tough job. Again, plenty has been spoken and written about that. There is a lot of neoliberal investment behind it, but there was joy in watching Freddie Freeman and his incredible batting, which will boost his holistic Hall of Fame argument one of these days.

There is not much more one can add about how they ran the Yankees through the gauntlet of a gentleman’s sweep even though Shohei Ohtani was de-powered by a bad shoulder and their pitching staff was a cast of many. The victorious Dodgers did fan service for the anti-analytics crowd by winning through situational batting and executing the basics.

Much bandwidth was expended about Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ $36-mil righty ace, not covering first base. Or $40-mil slugger Aaron Judge not catching a relatively easy line drive in centrefield.

The richest part is the autumn rite of finding out ‘The Book’ one pennant winner had on another. The Yankees come off as Doofus Culture in pinstripes, with poor fundamentals and bad body language.

Take it away, Joel Sherman:

What the Dodgers told their players in scouting meetings was the Yankees were talent over fundamentals. That if you run the bases with purpose and aggression, the Yankees will self-inflict harm as was exposed by Betts, Tommy Edman, Freddie Freeman, etc. That the value was very high to put the ball in play to make the Yankees execute. They mentioned that the Yankees were not just the majors’ worst baserunning team by every metric, but the difference was vast on the field between them and the Padres, who the Dodgers beat in the NL Division Series, but were impressive in this area. 

They were thrilled at how short Yankee leads were at first base to potentially be less of a threat on pivots at second, where Gavin Lux does not excel. They said their metrics had the Yankees as the worst positioned outfield. They were amazed how many times relay throws came skittering through the infield with no one taking charge and how often Jazz Chisholm Jr., for example, was out of place or just standing still when a play was in action.  (New York Post, Oct. 29)

Sure, they might say, but Aaron Judge hit 58 home runs this season. Juan Soto is the active leader in on-base percentage. Giancarlo Stanton is MLB’s active home runs leader but cannot run full speed to score from second base on a single since he is a 6-foot-6, 245-pound athlete with tender hamstrings (overtrain much?). And Gerrit Cole was a 300-strikeout pitcher in 2019.

File all of that under Shiny Object Syndrome, a big symptom of Doofus Culture and galaxy brain.

Congratulations, Yankees. For the 15th season in a row, they mastered making the whole less than the sum of their parts, after starting on third base. Hmm. Who else started on third base, went bankrupt over and over, and somehow people trust him?

Now, the Dodgers embody another kind of empire. They are a big-payroll team that simply hasn’t neglected the finer points. They are not necessarily likable, but is that the be-all and end-all? Their objective is to win. However, they played the kind of baseball people say they want to see. The obvious simile is obvious, is it not?

Doofus Culture, very loosely self-defined, also hearkens to the much-discussed main character syndrome. If there is to be any hope in electoral politics, the centre-left must get dirty going into “media ghettos where information is catered by algorithms and platform owners. Conservatives and corporations learned that lesson and spent billions of dollars to ensure that half the country’s social media consumption is infested with bots and edited videos that appeal to cultural grievances.”⁷

Getting dirty, though, is not the same as playing dirty. How to do that in public spaces needs to be discussed among people at much, much higher pay and professional grades.

At least, in baseball, Mookie Betts stands as the distinguished gentleman who defines the difference. He has good details. That is etched into his all-roundness as a ballplayer who made a nearly unprecedented mid-career switch from an outfield corner to the middle infield. That seldom happens, but it speaks well for baseball that the Dodgers went against orthodoxy. Generally, going against orthodoxy when someone has shown their skills and tools make it possible is good.

It is weak thinking when people get hung up on the label, or the outer social coding of a person. And that is part of the Doofus Culture too, living in absolutism and binarism They change the subject to “America” or “we” so as to project broad sweeping generalizations, all the better to not have to think about their biases, or what kind of social environment their children, if they are fortunate enough to have them, will encounter soon enough. (I am probably doing the same, but at least I’m confronting it, because it’s an emotional prison.)

Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers”. Sometimes, these people would be persuaded, but more often than not it was a red line. Many conversations would start with positive discussions on policy and then end on Harris and her gender. That is an extraordinary and uncomfortable truth. (The Guardian, Nov. 9)

I dunno, this might not connect to sports.

Well, forgive me, though, for believing having class and couth meant that you never rule out someone for a role due to their racial presentation and/or gender identity. Conservatives, come to think of it, always say, the best person for the job, so they must feel the same, then.

This is where thinking in sports metaphors helps. In baseball, Ohtani has opened minds about a two-way pitcher-batter. Betts has shown that, in a multi-positions baseball world, someone can be drafted as a middle infielder, convert to the outfield to avoid being blocked by an older player, then re-discover second base and shortstop at age 30. And we learn that the only limit was an arbitrary one.

Of course, if Betts moves back there so the Dodgers open right field for Juan Soto, that will only speak to the economic issues in MLB. A salary cap is a non-starter. However, as a business, it needs to figure out a competitive balance, and not have a handful of Scott Boras clients all playing in Atlanta, L.A., Philadelphia, and New York.

The Dodgers, bottom line, were tough in the face of a tough job.

The Yankees were found to be jelly-soft when it mattered. In other words, they were Fake Tough Guys, who Doofus Culture amplifies and attracts. It should be rejected wholeheartedly.

A 30-day MLB postseason is a stretch

Money makes the world go ’round — Monty Python sang it so — but it crushes the taut plotting of playoff baseball. The playoffs work when they are small and compact — four teams, eight teams — and over in a couple of weeks.

There are, of course, hundreds of millions of reasons why a month-long tournament now prevails. It just seemed like too big of an ask for people to stay with an entire month-long tournament. At a sensory level, October baseball in the first days of the playoffs feels exciting, all heightened urgency, a welcome tonal shift from the day-in-day-out slog across 162 games.

And, then, it just dragged on. And, in the end, nothing changed, since the coastal-behemoth Dodgers and Yankees ended up being the World Series teams. The build-up where one had to entertain the fiction of the Kansas City Royals or Milwaukee Brewers making a run was incredibly unnecessary. Of course, if one of those pretenders had got hot for three weeks, it would have invalidated what baseball did so well until 1994 — insisting that the ‘Regseason’ matters if you want to win it all.

Lowering standards is how Doofus Culture gets a foot in the door, by the way. Callback!

However, it will last for at least 2025, ’26, and ’27. That is the length of a contract to put ads on the batting helmets.⁸ It just takes baseball further in selling out its uniqueness for product placement.

As a fan, you don’t have to rationalize or normalize that. Really, and this will be a subject on another day, the sport needs to re-think how it handles the whole climax to the season from Aug. 15 to around Oct. 17. Roughly, that is the period from just before the start of the American football season, to when it heats up.

The World Series should be decided before The Third Saturday in October, there I said it.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.

Oct. 29-Nov. 12, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas.

1. Steve Gardner and Gabe Lacques, “Yankees fans banned from Game 5 after 'egregious' Mookie Betts incident,” USA Today, Oct. 30.

2. Source: Baseball-Reference.com.

3. Okay, let’s have the Dictionary.com definitions. Klep-tok-ruh-see: “a government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.” Kak-uh-stok-ruh-see: “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

4. Jeremy Cluff, “Yankees fan banned vs Dodgers played hockey at Arizona, was Rob Gronkowski’s friend,” Arizona Republic, Oct. 30.

5. Jesse Rogers, “Yankee Stadium fans ejected for prying ball from Mookie Betts' glove,” Oct. 29.

6. Citations are locatable. It is a wearying part of discourse when one uses their time to read credible news articles, shares them, and gets waved off before anyone could have read it all.

7. Darrell Owens, “Why Harris Lost Uninformed Voters,” The Discourse Lounge, Nov. 11.

8. “MLB pairs with apparel company, to use helmet ad for playoffs,” ESPN.com, Sept. 13.