Read This: How baseball is whitewashing itself right into irrelevance
Last October, when Toronto Blue Jays player José Bautista dramatically flipped his bat after hitting a home run during a playoff game, it was the kind of gutsy, attention-grabbing move that professional baseball really needs more of in the new millennium. So why did Hall Of Famer Goose Gossage tell ESPN that Bautista was a “disgrace to the game” after the stunt? While the NFL crushes the ratings and the NBA fires up imaginations on social media, Major League Baseball is starting to look more and more like a dusty, antiquated relic of America’s past. Part of the problem, writer Jay Caspian Kang argues, is that the gatekeepers of America’s pastime (read: grouchy old white people) are failing to properly showcase the achievements of Latino players and are barely even trying to appeal to young African-Americans. Kang takes the sport to task for these and other oversights in a New York Times think piece called “The Unbearable Whiteness Of Baseball.”