The career of a Tampa Bay Rays player is in jeopardy. He is stricken with a disease that is spreading more and more, specifically among major league baseball players.
Symptoms of this disease can worsen quickly: bruises, broken bones and concussions. Luckily, there aren’t too many complications for this player so far.
Said player is Randy Arozarena, one of the best young players in major league baseball. His disease is to put on a show. He smiles, dances and expresses his emotions a lot during the matches. And it’s dangerous, because he can get fast balls to the head because of it.
In fact, he’s not sick at all. It is rather the conservative baseball community that finds it a disease, a virus to eradicate: that of expressing one’s emotions and putting on a show.
Arozarena celebrated a home run Saturday against the Yankees and it got him hit twice by rapids when he came up to bat afterwards.
like the plague
In all sports, that’s okay. But, in baseball, it’s like the plague. You can’t look happy or proud.
In football, guys do choreography after a touchdown.
In basketball, players make incredible “dunks”, even if it does not change the number of points it gives.
In soccer, the match stops for five minutes when Lionel Messi scores a goal. The party is stuck.
In hockey, Connor McDavid, a rather conservative player, spins his arm like a propeller when he scores in the playoffs.
Arozarena could therefore do whatever he wants in any sport. But in baseball, it does not pass.
He is one of the hundreds of young players who are reforming baseball through their personality, their style, their transparency: they celebrate, dance and laugh.
They have great fun. They do “bat flips”, raise their arms after retiring a batter, puff out their chests while looking at the opponent, parry after home runs.
Have fun
Randy Arozarena was born in Cuba. At 15, her father died. At 19, he was very good at baseball. He asked his mother if he could flee the country. It was the best solution for him to go earn money elsewhere to help his family who remained in the country.
He embarked on a raft and risked his life to flee the Cuban regime.
After going through all that, do you think he sees life, Randy Arozarena, with millions of dollars in Florida?
He has fun! He profits. Life is beautiful. He smiles, he sings, he has fun… When a veteran tells him to stop jumping for joy or not to sign autographs between rounds, he doesn’t give a shit.
He therefore hit his home run on Saturday and stopped on the third base line, crossing his arms and smiling in front of his coach who was in front of the Yankees bench. In fact, Arozarena always folds her arms like this after hitting something good, after a home run, at the end of the game or after a double.
But then the mean, serious Yankees ruled it didn’t make sense this time around. Boom! On his next turns at bat, the pitcher hit him close to the ribs and another on the elbow.
Getty Images via AFP
Here is the image of the precise incident which raised the ire of the Yankees who decided to reach him twice in the game afterwards. Randy Arozarena stopped after third base crossing his arms looking at his coach who also crossed his arms. All this in front of the Yankees bench.
Do you have any idea how dangerous a baseball going 92 miles per hour can be? In the documentary Fastball, of players say they thought their lives were at stake every time they came up to bat against Nolan Ryan.
About 15 players have died in history after being shot in the head in professional or college baseball.
This is what the fans want?
Arozarena isn’t the only one with the disease. Many players are becoming more and more emotional and stepping out of the stereotype of the jaded, cold and stoic-looking player.
Bryce Harper flexes his muscles, Vlad Jr. dances salsa, Ronald Acuna Jr. frolics after a circuit and Wander Franco invented the “ball flip” before doing a relay. Jose Bautista did a bat flip that became one of the greatest moments in Canadian baseball history.
As luck would have it, when you look at the kids in the stadiums, they very often have jerseys from these players. They are the ones who sell advertising and they are the ones the young people imitate at the local park.
Quebecer Josue Peley is well placed to comment on this whole debate. From 2017 to 2019, he worked as a Blue Jays interpreter. He was therefore with the team at all times, including in the dugout.
It was a debate “every day”, he says.
“We had Jose Bautista, Marcus Stroman and Josh Donaldson” who were very expressive and “others who were more old school,” he says.
According to him, it is time for baseball to “evolve”. Peley is “outraged” that Arozarena has been hit twice.
“He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s always like that. It didn’t slow the game down, it didn’t hurt anyone. He had his little celebration and started playing his game again […] and then they throw rapids at him. It’s the only sport where you see that. And the pitcher will not be punished. It does not go there, with the stick .
Josue Peley welcomes the spectacle that young players want to give. “I love it! Let’s not forget that this is a show. When you pay $120 to go see a game, you want to see a show. We have to change the mentality”, he continues, specifying that the limit remains respect.
But in baseball culture, a trifle seems to become “a disrespect,” where an entire football team can dance the macarena after a touchdown without it being seen as a disrespectful gesture.
It’s ridiculous. It is time for mentalities to change. Let baseball evolve. Because it is, indeed, a spectacle for the benefit of the fans, and not for the mind-numbing conservative pride of certain players.