SHORTS OF THE FINEST QUALITY
ANDERSON, BAEZ ARE TWO OF THE BEST AT THEIR POSITION; THEY ALSO ARE AGENTS OF CHANGE IN THE GAME
There’s a pitched battle for baseball’s soul, and its epicenter is Chicago.
To be more precise, it’s a small patch of land between third base and second base. It’s the shortstop position, but it’s so much more than that for the Cubs’ Javy Baez and the White Sox’ Tim Anderson. It’s a canvas, a pulpit, a countercultural statement.
You can’t miss either player, even if you wanted to — and there are plenty of people who want to. Both are in the middle of the field, and both are in the middle of everything, on and off the diamond. Both are controversial and unapologetic. Both are 26 and passionate, and both smirk at the game’s age-old conventions and unwritten rules. Each has been known to admire his home runs more than is considered proper, as long as baseball’s canon is doing the considering.
With attendance and TV numbers falling, and with a younger generation of sports fans not caring for the slow pace of the game, the two shortstops are exactly what baseball needs. Are they enough to save it? Well, Baez’s nickname is “El Mago’’ — The Magician.
He’s a brilliant, almost artistic shortstop who makes plays that many other fielders can’t. His ability to put down a tag has inspired pages of poetry. Most importantly to the future of the game, there’s a style to him that draws in people. Everything about him is loud — his mighty swings, his backhanded stops in the hole, his dismissal of those who criticize him for being flashy. “Flashy,’’ by the way, often is baseball code for “Latin player.’’
Anderson is among the American League batting leaders, and he has power. His struggles defensively have been welldocumented, but to focus on them is to miss the point of the man. He’s a change agent.
It’s a pity Anderson won’t be playing in this weekend’s Cubs-Sox series at Guaranteed Rate Field. The full measure of what’s going on in baseball would have been on display. Alas, he’s out with a sprained ankle.
But it doesn’t change what either player is. Baez is an All-Star. Anderson should have been.
As much as anything, they are walking, talking lightning rods. They are the reflection of the struggle for the essence of the game, which is rooted in its white, agrarian beginnings.
Anderson made national news in April after Major League Baseball suspended him one game for using the N-word during a dust-up with the Royals. This was notable because he’s black and the player he yelled it at is white. The Royals had taken offense to Anderson’s exuberant home-run bat flip, and the next time he came to the plate, pitcher Brad Keller hit him with a 92 mph fastball, setting off the benches-clearing altercation. That’s when umpires overheard Anderson calling Keller a “weak-ass f---ing n-----.”
Fans of a certain age and temperament loved the fire in it and couldn’t understand the suspension, given Anderson’s skin color. Fans drawn to the game’s traditions loved Keller’s response to the look-at-me bat flip.
Wherever you stand on the issue, one thing is clear: The old ways aren’t helping to sell the sport. Many of the kids who do follow the game have no use for them. How Anderson and Baez carry themselves, however, does speak to the younger generation.
“I don’t know the old-school rules,’’ Anderson said in April. “I guess those are the rules when those guys played, but they’re not playing anymore. So I think we’re going to switch it up a little bit.’’
He caused eyes to roll when, in an interview with Sports Illustrated after the incident with the Royals, he compared himself to the man who broke baseball’s color line.
“I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson,” he said. “That’s huge to say. But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game, and I feel like I’m getting to a point to where I need to change the game.”
He might have gotten a bit ahead of himself, but his point was that, in a sport that seems to want everyone cut from the same cloth and to the same dimensions, he’s making his own fashion statement — and people are following him.
Baez knows all about that. Last season’s runner-up for the National League MVP award is one of the most exciting and popular players in baseball. But like corduroy, he rubs a lot of people the wrong way. One of those people is Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, who got upset last season when Baez flipped his bat after a weak pop-up.
“You watch their kid flip that bat last night?” Hurdle said. “Where’s the respect for the game? The guy hits four homers in two days, so that means you can take your bat and throw it 15, 20 feet in the air when you pop up like you should have hit your fifth home run?’’
That didn’t sit well with Baez or with the fans who couldn’t understand the fuss over the flip of a bat.
“I bust my ass every day to play hard,” he said. “I don’t think anyone plays this game harder than me. I respect [the game]. I respect whatever, but you don’t go out there and talk trash about someone. I have a lot of things I could say right now, but I don’t control what’s out there, what people talk about me.”
He and Anderson might control where baseball is going, though. Two men of color are making a splash in what, for many decades, had been a very pasty sport. They’re drawing attention to a game in dire need of it. And they’re doing it in Chicago, the heart of it all.