I find it very difficult to believe that Senator John McCain is as mad about the Dodgers jumping in the Diamondback’s pool upon clinching the NL West regular season championship as his recent Twitter rant implies. McCain’s words, that the Dodgers are, “a bunch of overpaid, immature, arrogant, spoiled brats” feel a bit, well, hypocritical seeing as how the man did run for president of the United States with Sarah Palin.
I guess you have to stick up for your hometown team, though I’m not so sure an elected official—who lost one of the most influential color barrier races in history, and made a local election ad around the catch phrase “complete the dang fence”— should be on Twitter calling out teams employing defectors and players with immigrant families as spoiled, overpaid, or arrogant.
….Immature?
Alright, I’ll give you that one.
But hey, baseball players should never be confused with sensible adult men. They play a kid’s game for a living and exist in a world where winning justifies everything, you get pied in post game interviews, and rookies dress as hooters girls in hazing rituals. That’s why, as ludicrous as it is for McCain to sound off about his D-Backs getting whooped, the accusations from Willie Bloomquist, Diamondbacks utility player and bonafied major league man-child, that the Dodgers were enjoying their victory *the wrong way*, is asinine.
Asinine, but not unexpected. The Diamondbacks have had trouble interpreting the unwritten rules of baseball all season. Don’t tell me you forgot how Ian Kennedy put a fastball into Yasiel Puig’s snout? Or that Zack Greinke unloaded a clip trying to hit Miguel Montero in retaliation, only for, again, Kennedy to hit the scattershot Greinke in retaliation for retaliation?
After Greinke got drilled, those spoiled brat Dodgers went after those gritty Diamondbacks and we had ourselves an old fashion, bear knuckle rule interpretation. I Remember it well since, even though I played with they guy, that was first time I ever saw JP Howell’s angry side (like Shaggy from Scooby Doo finally lost it).
Even months after the event we still don’t know who’s fault it really was. Puig’s for being too flashy? Kennedy for being too gritty? Palin for giving us the apropos phrase, “drill baby, drill?”
But it doesn’t matter now. The final word has been spoken in the one universally understood language of baseball: winning. The Dodgers came to Arizona, to the Diamondbacks house, and beat them at their own game… and then jumped in their goddam pool. Why? Because they could. Because they won. Because the Diamondbacks can replace whatever water was splashed out with the tears they’re crying over it.
And some how, some way, a team not even remotely associated with this event gets drawn into it. The Yankees.
That’s because Willie Bloomquist, in his throws of pool invasion outrage, said that what the Dodgers did was not only classless, but that the Yankees would never do something like it.
I’m sorry, did Bloomquist just cite the Yankees as the benchmark of class? You mean the franchise that harbors baseball’s most epic cheat, a shortstop who sends gift baskets to his booty-calls, and was once owned by a man who got suspended from baseball because of his connections with the Watergate scandal?
Oh, oh, I get it what you’re saying—all that stuff is fine because the Yankees would only go swimming during open pool hours.
Stop, Sweet Willie, stop. You’d have an easier time convincing me that what the Dodgers did was wrong because they went swimming in a pool with no lifeguard on duty.
For the record, why the hell should the Dodgers listen to an argument that hinges on what the Yankees would do. Do the Diamondbacks— a team that has shaped its image around the four letter word “grit” and smears wet dirt its face post victory—do everything the Yankees do? Is not the point of winning to establish to the whole world, “this is how WE do it?”
So you think the Dodgers are classless. Big deal. You know as well as I do that the definition of class is just another of the ethereal baseball rules that has been around since the dawn of the game but never makes it to print, anywhere, ever. You know baseball class is a provincial thing with no gold standard to back it. You know that, by even raising an objection after a disappointing season, you’ve brought your own class under scrutiny. So why sound off at all?
I guess that’s for you to deicide Willie, and you’ll have plenty of time to think about it this off season, by the pool.