Emotion is a Good Thing People

When you think back about iconic moments in baseball history, a few great examples come to mind.  Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game, Joe Carter’s walk-off home run, and Ray Knight scoring the winning run after the ball snuck through Bill Buckner’s legs are just a few.  We can picture these three exhilarating moments in our head, and can see one thing they all have in common.  Emotion.

Baseball is a game with moments that elicit extreme bouts of emotions whether they are high or low.  It is why players love to play the game, and why fans love to watch the game.  We are all emotionally connected to the game in one way or another.  Some see a picture of Joe Carter and can’t help but smile; others hear something that rhymes with Buckner and start to tear up.  Good or bad, our emotions define our devout love with the game of baseball, and the teams that we root for.

Recently there have been arguments regarding the way players express themselves on the field with retired Hall of Famer Goose Gossage in the center of it all.  Gossage called out Blue Jays right fielder Jose Bautista for his now infamous bat flip in last year’s Divisional Series saying he was “a disgrace to the game”.  He and other critics see current players as punk kids who like to show off and show up the other players on the field.  While in individual instances this may be true, many examples are merely a changing in the times.

Our world is forever evolving, with each generation immersing their own style and flare into society.  When a group begins to do something different, the previous generation(s) are going to criticize them for it.  If Twitter and the 24 hour a day news cycle had existed in the 70’s, we may have had a quote from Joe DiMaggio expressing his disgust for the hairstyles and facial hair that Goose Gossage and his teammates sported at the time.  We didn’t hear those types of complaints because former players were not at every Spring Training, on local talk shows, or tweeting their thoughts every day.  They had opinions, only there was no medium that allowed every person in the country to learn of them.  Self-expression and free speech have always been our right, now it is just more prevalent and acceptable.  Fans show more emotions in the stands (good and bad), and players show more emotion on the field.  Not every bat flip is meant to insult someone, and not every jump for joy is intended to show someone up.

I LOVE baseball, and with that love comes emotion.  I enjoy seeing the same level of emotion I possess in a player on the field because that means they love the game as much as I do.  It is expressed more now than it was in the past, but that is because our world is different now than it has ever been.  Personally, I thought the Jose Bautista bat-flip was one of the most exciting moments of the postseason.  No one criticized Yogi Berra, Joe Carter, or Ray Knight for showing their emotion.  Those are all celebrated moments of the game.  Bautista’s bat-flip is just the 2015 version of that.  Emotion is a good thing people, it means that players care.  If you can show it in the stands, there is no reason the players can’t show it on the field.  Yes, they need to have respect for their opponents, and there are times when it should be avoided (choreographed sack celebrations on a football field when your team is down 21-0 is an example).  If any time is acceptable though, hitting a home run to take a late lead in the deciding game of a playoff series is the time.  Bautista was excited, and he showed it in his own way.  There is nothing wrong with that.

In the end, I only have two requests:

Dear players, please keep showing us that you love the game just as much as we do.  If you are bored on the field, I am going to be bored watching you.

Dear fans, chill out.  If you follow Bautista on Twitter, he will probably follow you back.  Maybe then you will feel special and you can stop complaining about the guy.  He is a really good hitter and he is just having fun.

I think that anyone over the age of 30 has a little bit of the old man “get off my lawn” mentality in them.  I am a high school teacher and I roll my eyes at things students do every day.  They don’t use complete sentences (or even words sometimes) they use emoji’s.  They all have at least four different social media accounts that are their first priority.  They tried to teach me Snapchat, and I posed the question, “if someone wants me to see a picture they took why can’t they just text it to me or put it on Facebook?”  They looked at me like I was 80.  Then I realized that the way I look at them is probably the same way my Dad looked at me when I was playing NBA Jam on Sega Genesis while it was a beautiful sunny day outside.  It will also be the same look that they will give their kids in the year 2040 when they are communicating with their friends telepathically and taking weekend trips to Mars (I’m assuming).