First, Take A Look At Yourself(ie)

During Wednesday night's game between the Arizona Diamondbacks (eliminated from postseason contention on September 20) and the Colorado Rockies (eliminated from postseason contention back in Spring Training), broadcaster Steve Berthiaume and color commentator/former D'backs manager Bob Brenly spent a solid two minutes at the beginning of the bottom half of the fourth inning making snide comments about a group of young women taking selfies in the stands. David Peralta hit a leadoff single up the middle while this was happening, and the two men took all of two seconds to note this before returning to ridiculing the girls.

Fans of irony will appreciate the call by Berthiaume: "Peralta knocks it into center...David tonight, 2-for-2, leadoff single here in the fourth, and (as the camera once again leaves the field to focus on the unsuspecting group) nobody noticed!" Again, this call comes after a full minute and a half of him and his cohort focusing entirely on these women, making fun of them for missing the action. It was all they had been talking about since returning from the commercial break.



As SBNation.com's Tanya Bondurant and several others pointed out, baseball should embrace the chaos that comes with our heavy reliance on our devices. They have an entire freaking company, MLB Advanced Media, that works exclusively to increase the online presence of all 30 teams. This is usually accomplished by tweets, videos, GIFs et. al. posted by employees of each franchise, but is fueled in large part by the pictures and videos fans take at the game, both of the activity on the field and of themselves enjoying it. For a broadcaster to publicly condemn these women for using their phones to do EXACTLY what the game's higher ups want them to do is absurd.

Beyond that, why on earth would these two think that their comments wouldn't offend anyone watching? Any female at the game, watching it at home, or simply following along on At Bat would (and many did) take umbrage to Berthiaume and Brenly's barrage. The things they said were tasteless and wholly unprovoked past them simply seeing these women taking selfies. I refuse to believe that no male fans were doing the same, although I guarantee that had a group of guys been caught on their phones, the broadcasters wouldn't have made the same disparaging jokes. I personally detest the concept of the selfie, but the needless self-documenting of one's life is in no way exclusive to one sex.

Can't imagine why these girls would rather take pictures of themselves than watch Chad Bettis (who?) pitch to Jarrod Saltalamacchia (ugh). Courtesy MLB.com

Two points really stand out to me: First, deterring women from coming to a baseball game is as counterproductive as it gets. It's no secret that MLB's attendance numbers and TV ratings are eons behind those of the NFL, leading to the creation of many programs and events designed to widen the game's appeal. Moreover, the game has made efforts to diversify their ranks and hire well-qualified minorities and women, and added more muscle to their inclusion department, headed by former player Billy Bean, to make the game more LGBTQ-friendly. Baseball wants to get better and be more socially conscious. The problem is that so many people (rather, men) around the game have no frame of reference for it.

I don't need to remind you how players like Torii Hunter and Daniel Murphy reacted to Bean's efforts, but I will to illustrate my point: most baseball players, likely as a result of their fierce competitiveness, are stubborn to a fault. They're so resistant to change that they've caused baseball to get stuck in stasis when it comes to making the game appealing to people of all genders, races and sexual preferences. If you love baseball, that's all that should really matter in both the clubhouse and the stadium. This game is supposed to unify us as a country, the national pastime in perpetuity; it's not meant to divide us on arbitrary bullshit like taking a picture on your phone.

Second, it comes as no surprise that this was said by announcers employed by the Diamondbacks. Although general manager Kevin "Eye For An Eye" Towers and field manager Kirk "The Enforcer" Gibson have been gone for some time, their spiritual (and actual) replacements - Tony LaRussa and Dave Stewart - aren't exactly the paradigm of sensitivity. For years now, Arizona has employed men who publicly espouse the benefits of hitting another human being with a hard, tiny sphere coming in at roughly the same speed and force as a locomotive, justifying it by the flimsy excuse "You accidentally hit one of ours, we intentionally aim for your MVP's head". That their views on sexism and technology are outdated and ignorant is no great shock.

While it's nice to think that MLB might take notice and hold their emissaries more accountable for the things they say on live television as a result of Berthiaume and Brenly's comments, keep in mind that they swept the whole "players taking dangerous amounts of performance-enhancing drugs with reckless abandon" thing under the rug for the better part of two decades. While new commissioner Rob Manfred has made some great strides already, this gives him an opportunity to improve the social standing of the game, and cement his legacy, early on in his tenure.