Prior to his start on Wednesday night, Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura had left all four of his starts earlier than he had anticipated: twice due to injury and twice due to ejection. He incited a benches-clearing incident after exchanging heated words with Mike Trout, pointed at his head while yelling at Brett Lawrie (after hitting Lawrie with a pitch), and yelled “F— you!” to Adam Eaton after fielding a come-backer that the center fielder had hit right to him. He has been deemed “baseball’s most hated player” by the Washington Post, been told to “dial it down” by another pitcher on Twitter, and been repeatedly admonished by baseball journalists across the country. As a baseball fan, I would like to voice my support for the young right hander and say: thank you, Yordano, for being the most valuable player in baseball so far this season.
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Last July, I watched Ventura take the mound at a nearly empty Kaufmann Stadium. The Royals’ TV feed featured a low, handheld camera angle from beside the mound that highlighted just how few people the rookie was pitching in front of. I lamented the idea that one of the game’s most exciting young pitchers didn’t get to show off his talents in front of a larger audience. Luckily, thanks to Kansas City’s inspiring playoff run in 2014, Yordano Ventura has been given the opportunity to perform on the national stage. And perform he has.
Recently, Chris Rock went on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to discuss the declining interest in baseball among black Americans. The comedian cited MLB’s love of looking back to the past and playing the game “the right way” (which Rock said was synonymous with “the white way”) as reasons why black people are gravitating more towards the other major American sports. Days later, as if on cue, Ventura incited a benches-clearing brawl that White Sox announcer Hawk Harrelson denounced as “sheer stupidity,” and said of Ventura “if he keeps that stuff up, he’s gonna get his behind whipped.” When an old, white announcer says that a young, black player will be getting his “behind whipped,” it is problematic for a variety of reasons and perfectly demonstrates the troubling attitudes alluded to by Chris Rock regarding the baseball old guard and what they consider “the right way” to play the game.
It is safe to say that nobody tunes into baseball games to see Hawk Harrelson’s color commentary, and hearing him say “you can put it on the booooard, yes!” isn’t generating interest in the sport amongst Chicago’s youth. But kids in Kansas City are signing up for little league at drastically increased rates, and they are doing this because of Yordano Ventura and the Kansas City Royals. The Royals are good, they are scrappy, they are fun, and damnit, they know how to pick a fight. If Yordano Ventura being so amped up that he curses out Mike Trout, the best player in baseball, just because Trout hit a line drive past him is the wrong way to play the game, then I don’t want to be right.
Regardless of how prevalent advanced statistics and in-depth analysis have become in baseball’s culture, it is still a game that children play. We didn’t start watching baseball because Sabermetrics seemed like fun. We started caring about Sabermetrics because we fell in love with baseball. It seems hypocritical to romanticize the great rivalries in the sport, yet condemn the Royals for making every team in the league their rivals. I grew up watching the Red Sox and Yankees duke it out seemingly every time they met in the early 2000s. Would I still be a baseball fan if Pedro Martinez hadn’t sent a seventy-two-year-old Don Zimmer tumbling to the ground? Probably, but seeing that certainly helped convince me that baseball is awesome. But kids in Kansas City wouldn’t be flocking to the sport if their team wasn’t so captivating, and Yordano Ventura and his attitude are at the heart of that movement. If the Royals had reached the World Series last year then come out and flopped to start the 2015 season, baseball in Kansas City would have gone right back to where it had been for the past two decades. Instead, they came out literally swinging at other teams, proving that they deserve to be both feared and talked about.
It is surprising to me that so few people within the baseball world are standing up for Ventura following his recent on-field incidents. Although Ventura doesn’t need me standing up for him – his fastball can do that – it is worth considering why so many are immediately condemning these as the actions of someone who is too young to know better, and why exactly we think it is so wrong for a young man to play the sport that is his livelihood with passion. Immediately following the brawl against the White Sox, Ventura told the media that he needs to work on controlling his emotions on the field. To me, the fact that a young talent is so passionate while playing baseball that he cannot control his emotions, can only mean good things for the sport. And if on the off chance there is a young black boy watching a baseball game (the odds of which, according to Chris Rock, are not very good), and if that boy plays sports with emotion and intensity, and if he sometimes struggles to control his anger, he should not be made to feel that there is no place for him in baseball; especially not by some old white guy with a bunch of dumb catchphrases.
One of my favorite athletes of all time is Kevin Garnett. Garnett is one of the most passionate players in basketball, as well as one of the most hated by his opponents. When Garnett gets in the face of an opposing player for what outsiders would consider a trivial matter, announcers don’t say into microphones on live television that he is stupid and going to get his behind whipped. They respect the fact that Kevin Garnett has been one of the best players in the game that they love, and that his intensity is a valuable part of what he contributes on the court. That passion is just as valuable on a baseball diamond, particularly when it comes from a young player who can not only take control on the mound, but can captivate a young audience in a city that is falling in love with baseball again, at a time when baseball needs all the love it can get.
