The arrogant thinking of liberal sports writers

The recent self-consciousness of progressive sports writers also misleads many of them into thinking all their quarrels are with conservative ideas, when they are in fact just arguing with the voluble and inarticulate. Sports radio hosts and their callers are often (wrongly) taken as the stand-in for opposing ideas.

Some of the debates in baseball in particular are given ideological or racial names, when in fact they are generational. Take the debate about bat-flips, which is often cast as one between stodgy white conservatives and fun multicultural liberals who prefer a Latin game. There is a reason why older Baby Boomer writers, who are themselves veterans of a deeply hierarchical system that rewarded time-serving veterans who spent decades writing formulaic gamers, are more likely to admire and defend the hierarchical culture among athletes that includes hazing a rookie, or letting expressive or cocky young players know they have to earn their place in the pecking order. And it’s not a surprise that younger writers who smashed through to national audiences through opinionated new digital platforms admire the more expressive players.

But there’s only so much that this new crop of sports writers can truly identify with the players they admire. Socially cosseted with other journalists, liberal sports writers increasingly identify with the only set of actors in the sports world that come from a cultural milieu relatable to their own: the new class of rationalizing, brainy executives. In another generation, sports writers dreamed futilely of being Willie Mays or Gordie Howe. Now they want to be Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey. And their copy and concerns increasingly seem to be written for each other and for these analytics-loving general managers.