On baseball and marketing

Howdy all. Hope you had a better weekend than I did.

In any case, check this out. This is a very interesting story to me, and hopefully to you all too. From a historical perspective, it's almost like there's two ends of the prejudicial spectrum: the way things were when Jackie Robinson first came up, and now. we're currently going through a kind of anti-racism, where we do our best to, I don't know, 'make up' for the things that happened decades ago. As far as I'm concerned, this is as bad as racism. Through things like affirmative action, we tell the world that people of different races or creeds need to be coddled. This sets them apart from others, which is exactly why there's so much tension. I'm reminded of a South Park episode, where Chef tried to get the South Park flag (which portrayed a black stick figure being hung while white stick figures danced around) changed. In the end, everything was made better when he realized that people (the main children in particular) were arguing for it because they didn't see it as white people hanging a black person, just some people hanging someone else, which I guess is part of the history of the town. While the example is a little off (due to the nature of the show, naturally) the feeling is a good one. People of different colors are just that: people. Why do we insist of reminding people of our differences?

Woo, tangent. Back to baseball. I personally don't think that the teams mentioned in the article that didn't have any ties to Robinson (St. Louis, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Houston and Philadephia) but decked the whole team out in 42 should have done so. I think all that it does is turn a pivital event in American cultural history into nothing more than an opportunity for some feel-good PR. I wonder how players who were the only people on their teams to wear the number felt about seeing dozens of 42s on the field for other teams. At the same time, how can it be justified to say to these teams that they can't honor the occasion in the way that they want? How how about people like Arizona's Eric Byrnes, a particularly white person, who wanted to wear 42 as well? The D-Backs had 5 players and a coach wear 42, and Byrnes was the only caucasion one. Does a white man wearing 42 change the emotion behind it at all? It's a tricky situation, to be sure.

As far as I'm concerned, in the end it was a classy move by (I think) the classiest of the major sports. Kudos for Ken Griffey, Jr. for the good idea. The silly social questions that came up in the end don't take away much from the gesture, but we should still think a little bit on whether or not the feeling behind it would have been the same if just one player for each team was chosen for the honor. Just a thought.