Worst Fans in Sports – The Blog

Mike heeley

If you listened to our podcast titled “Aaron Hates the Titanic” released on 6-20-2023, you heard me read the rantings of a lunatic upset about the fact that baseball players don’t play the game “pepper” anymore.  If you didn’t listen to the ‘cast, let me regale you with the nonsense that was spewed from this troglodyte’s lips. But first…the set up.

A Facebook page called “SABR Ballparks” posted this query “Once a ballpark staple.  What became of the ‘No Pepper’ signs?”  Most people suggested that the signs are no longer there because they were removed for advertisement space.  Makes sense.  Baseball is an expensive game, and advertising dollars help support the costs of salaries, travel, utilities, etc.  I went a step further and said that stadiums today have state of the art training facilities in them, players don’t need to go put divots in the outfield playing pepper.  But one keyboard warrior had a different take as to why pepper is no longer played by professional baseball players.  If you guessed it’s because they’re all pussies, you guessed correctly.

A shit-for-brains with the initials AW wrote “Pepper? In the age of sliding gloves? The soul of baseball is being replaced by the new generation with no regard for tradition.  Pepper is a forgotten game as the wheels of progress trample over all of the venerated customs of the old game.  Soon the industrial institution of baseball will forge a new game, not for the fan, but for the sponsors, the networks, for the money.  The love of the game, is replaced with the love of money.  The romance is gone, pepper is just another victim. I shall stay in the past where my baseball still plays pepper and people didn’t need gloves to steal a base”.  

So yes, he touched on more than just the fact that players want to not end their career with their thumbs torn off, but let’s get to the root of AW’s statement.  AW is a MAN.  He’s a MAN’S MAN, and he can’t stand it when MEN aren’t MEN.  And back in his day, MEN were SUPER STRONG and they did things like ride horses, mine for coal, eat tin cans for breakfast, and other manly things.  This new generation is a bunch of weaklings that only think about themselves and their multi-million-dollar contracts.  

If you are constantly wasting your life away by watching Facebook and Instagram Reels, Tik-Toks, and YouTube shorts like I am, you see a lot of grumpy people complaining about how things were better “back in their day”.  As a firmly placed mid-late Gen-Xer, I heard it very often from my Boomer parents.  “We walked to school in 2 feet of snow uphill both ways”.  “We didn’t have cable TV.” “We didn’t have computers”.  But I also heard this from them, a lot; “It is a parent’s job to make their kids’ lives easier than their lives were”.  And that’s where I get lost in all of this generational gatekeeping.  

So, which is it? Why does the generation that produces the next generation then complain about the lives that generation leads, as if they weren’t the ones that gave it to them? (This is one of those things that has been going on for centuries)  If my parents were really upset that our lives were made easier by school buses and calculators, then they wouldn’t have provided them for us.  If they really wanted us to live the way they did (both born during WW2), then they would have made us walk to school.  They would have made us make our own abacuses out of twine and rocks or something.  They sure as hell wouldn’t have bought us computers and a Nintendo.  No, they wanted to provide a better life for us than they had.  But that doesn’t mean we were free from the generational gatekeeping that came along with it.

One of my favorite types of generational gatekeeping is the inability to let people of a younger generation like the same music we do.  Yes, I admit, I don’t “get” new music, especially new hip-hop.  It doesn’t sound good to me.  I can’t tell one song from the last when my kids are listening to Lil {insert adjective here​}, or Young {insert noun here}.  Like Grandpa Simpson so eloquently said “I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.  Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.  It’ll happen to you!”  But if my kids  wanted to wear a Nirvana t-shirt, even only because it looked cool, I wouldn’t tell them “No! Nirvana is MY music, not yours” as I hear a lot from Gen Xers, and Millennials.  Actually, what they say is “I bet you can’t even name one song by them that isn’t ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’”.  I’d let them get the shirt, and then play them bands from the early nineties and hope they at least gain an appreciation for the music.  And if they don’t, cool. They can wear the shirt because it looks cool to them. 

The internet has done some very silly things to society.  It has given everyone a platform to voice their opinions.  Back in the day people only had their friends and colleagues to tell their opinions to.  If they were wanting to broadcast it to the masses, they’d have to get a bullhorn and stand on the street corner handing out flyers. (See here I am sounding like the Dana Carvey’s grumpy old man character, “back in my day the conspiracy theorists had to hand print pamphlets and hand them out on street corners to tell everyone their insane thoughts, and we liked it.  We loved it!) Well, social media is the world’s street corner.  And there are a lot more pedestrians around to consume your drivel.  You can be BIG, BAD, and EMBOLDENED behind the anonymity of a keyboard.  You can deride baseball players for wearing sliding gloves and call everyone that disagrees with you a cuck.  Those that think that baseball should only be played a certain way, that younger people are somewhat weaker because they can’t drive a stick shift, they are soft because schools have decided safety is better than having kids die in bus crashes, are generational gatekeepers.  And quite frankly, they need to step away from their keyboards and STFU.  ​​