Baseball is not a game for mollycoddles
The World Baseball Classic is the closest thing modern sports has to the Roman Colosseum. In Miami and Tokyo, the air was thick with a brand of raw, unadulterated fire the sanitized American sports machine has failed to produce in forty years.
Sadly, it had little to do with America or American fans.
Throughout the tournament, the Venezuelan dugout was a riot of joy and desperation. The Japanese bullpen contained hurlers with a clinical, terrifying devotion to their craft.
But contrary to the schmaltz and sycophancy in the puff pieces at ESPN, The New York Post, and other outlets, look at what happened with Team USA.
On paper, they are a collection of All-Stars. Yet they played the opening rounds with the emotional intensity of a middle manager filing quarterly expense reports. It was not an international dogfight they showed up to, but a mandatory corporate retreat sponsored by Major League Baseball.
This is the disease of modern entitlement. When we believe our own press releases, we risk such delusion becoming the final symptom of cultural decline.
A post-game phone call revealed the exact depth of the rot. Jack Callahan, American—correspondent and longtime rabble-rouser—took a break from mentoring his band of young writers to watch Team USA stumble through another championship-game loss.
The Americans fell to a Team Venezuela squad they should have dismantled by the fourth inning. Callahan did not mince words through the receiver.
“These guys think they have already won because they wear the right logo on their hats,” Jack barked. “It is the arrogance of the professional who has become a pampered amateur in spirit. They believe raw talent is a substitute for American grit.”
Callahan’s utter dismay hit the mark. Last week, Mark DeRosa, Team USA’s manager, failed to grasp how the tournament tie-breaker rules worked. Meanwhile, his star pitchers were held hostage by strict tournament-mandated pitch counts dictated by their billionaire employers and insurance companies.
These bureaucratic mandates treat elite athletes like fragile porcelain dolls.
Hall of Fame manager John McGraw of the New York Giants would never have stood for it. As he wrote in 1914, “Baseball is not a game for mollycoddles.”
Even though it is Spring Training—the preseason for the upcoming big league campaign—mollycoddling grown men with such rules is yet another symptom of institutional hypochondria masquerading as player safety. When a man plays for his country, he is not supposed to check his watch to see if it is time for a union-mandated break.
He finishes the job.
The baseball diamond does not care about fairness or television contracts. It respects only one thing: the violent execution of a good plan.
Team USA’s plan was haphazard, and the execution was nonexistent. Congratulations to Team Venezuela.
Brian D. O’Leary is a columnist, podcaster, direct-response copywriter, publisher, and the architect behind the platforms of several unapologetic entrepreneurs.
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