Therein lies baseball's biggest problem: their complete and utter aversion to change. Both the NFL and NBA have embraced the cocky swagger of their biggest stars; in fact, they've shrewdly marketed those athletes to great effect. Whether or not you like them, it's impossible to be a sports fan and remain unaware of every move LeBron James, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning make. They are eminently in the face of every sports fan on earth, something that can't be said about any baseball player outside of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez (for completely different reasons). You can throw Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen and Clayton Kershaw in that category, but even those three aren't instantly recognizable to everyone. Although the sport is more profitable than ever before, it still struggles to keep pace with those other leagues in terms of popularity. It seems silly to even have this discussion, because the solution is so glaringly obvious: give baseball some attitude. Becoming more "urban", to turn a phrase, is not a bad thing. Racial and ethnic diversity has only strengthened the appeal of basketball and football, and turned them into athletic monoliths. Baseball players want the freedom to express themselves to the same extent. There's no harm in letting them do so.
Understandably, the same sport that blackballed Jim Bouton hasn't come very far in the intervening decades since Ball Four pulled back the curtain for baseball fans. The culture surrounding the game is still mired in relative secrecy, players forced to tone down their personality for the sake of playing the game "the right way". This is seemingly nothing more than pandering to older fans, those who still remember the supposed good old days when ballplayers were viewed as demigods, instead of the sleazy, sexist jerks they are in actuality. I'm not saying players today are completely unscrupulous (as their past counterparts truly were), because many of them are clean-cut, respectable men. Still, even current players try to curb the enthusiasm of their peers: how many times has Carlos Gomez been beaned for supposedly admiring a long home run?
Beyond allowing players to express themselves with on-field celebrations, an even more sensitive scenario has arisen. Billy Bean (the former player and openly gay man, not the current Athletics GM/human trafficker) was hired by Major League Baseball last July as an "ambassador for inclusion", in the hopes of making the sport more friendly and appealing to LGBTQ people. To his credit, one of his first acts was going around to all 30 clubhouses during Spring Training, speaking on the merits of acceptance and compassion to 750 men who seemingly know nothing about either. For all the good Bean has done and continues to do, players like Torii Hunter (a staunchly religious player who has expressed his homophobia on multiple occasions) and Daniel Murphy (who explicitly said he "disagree[s] with the lifestyle" after Bean spoke to his Mets comrades) appear to have missed the point, undercutting his hard work. Keep in mind, this is the sport that didn't allow African Americans to play with white athletes for 70-something years. Members of the LGBTQ community, it stands to reason, face an even steeper uphill battle. Who will be the gender-fluid Jackie Robinson? Will there ever be a gay Larry Doby? Which person will be the first to break through, and as importantly, which executive for which team will be the one to take the plunge? Branch Rickey is almost as celebrated as the man who took a chance on Robinson, and their story of triumph against racial prejudice is well-known. But in this era, when sexual assault and harassment has turned into a monstrously prevalent issue, baseball seems to be dragging its feet. Admittedly, it's the NFL that has been rocked by abuse scandals more recently, but that only gives MLB every reason to jump out in front and show the world that it's the socially progressive association it's been making itself out to be for years.
That brings up another point: the cognitive dissonance on display in baseball is almost laughable. The higher-ups tout their game as the sport of inclusion, while simultaneously doing everything they can to dispel that notion. Unless I've missed something, and inclusion now means "accepting of everybody as long as they're male, Christian and straight". As little as they've done to make the product on the field more diverse, even less has happened in front offices. Ignoring the fact that only two managers (Lloyd McClendon and Fredi Gonzalez of the Mariners and Braves, respectively) are not white males, most teams have few to no minority or female executives, and even MLB's central office has seen a precipitous drop recently in the same areas. For baseball to truly be inclusive, they need to include everybody. Again, this seems simple enough to an ignorant blogger, so it would stand to reason that people far smarter than me feel the same way. That only makes the relative lack of diversity more confounding.
In all fairness, The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) points out that baseball does a fairly good job of hiring women and minorities. Even considering that, though, the sport's employment figures for those groups fall well short of the number of white males. If baseball is truly going to be the sport that most supports racial and gender equality, they've still got a ways to go. People like Bean have voices that need to be heard, and it's high time we as sports fans listen.
