Enough already

Not unusual to have a think piece about the state of baseball during the lull between the end of the LCS and World Series. Nor is it unusual for the “sky is falling” stories about how the sport is losing relevance, especially among African-Americans. So here’s this year’s model, penned by David Waldstein in yesterday’s New York Times.

I agree with most of what he has to say, but when I got to this paragraph, something snapped:

There are many reasons, but even baseball’s leaders acknowledge that the sport has not done enough to draw in Black fans and develop Black players. The game’s power structure is still mostly white, and many of its traditions, from discouraging bat-flipping to the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” originated in a time when the game was segregated.

I don’t want to get into the whole “cancel culture” debate, but are you telling me that standard tune for the seventh-inning stretch is offensive simply because it “originated in a time when the game was segregated?” By that logic, should we discard a large portion of “the great American songbook” since many of those tunes were written around that era? Should we dismiss much of the music from the big bands because they were not integrated?

Certainly there’s nothing in the lyrics that is discriminatory unless you object to the nationality of the hero of the song (either Nelly Kelly or Katie Casey, depending on the version) — ostensibly Irish — as exclusionary to Italians, Germans, Jews, et al.

Sorry, but until I hear otherwise on this specific issue, I’m calling bulls**t on the author.

Tagged as: Take Me Out to the Ball Game