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Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Servitude is loyalty
Patriot points out:
You have the strange concept of “loyalty”, which is a one-way street meaning that players are loyal to their teams, whatever that even means. Trades are accepted as part of the game, but if a player dares to leave via free agency, he is a scoundrel. Players who display what seems to qualify as loyalty (and thus admirable) are sometimes derided as losers (as seen when Jake Peavy initially rejected his trade to the White Sox). Players who are jerked around by their teams in service time maneuvers are expected to show loyalty. Players are expected to show loyalty to whichever team they happen to play for currently, even if they have a different hometown team they’d ideally like to play for.
His thought reminds me of a scene from the great Color Purple:
Eventually, Harpo became frustrated with Sophia’s perceived defiance; he complained to his stepmother, Ms. Celie. Now Harpo didn’t come right out and ask Ms. Celie if he should hit his wife to “make her mind.” But Ms. Celie’s response to his complaint that, “She won’t listen,” was just what he wanted to hear - “Beat her.” And he did, over and over again. Ms. Celie’s advice to Harpo was that of pure ignorance. At the time, she may have thought that life was supposed to be this way. In order to keep a woman in line, “Beat her.” It took many years of her own abuse, and the loss of her family through separation to realize that this was not how her life, or any woman’s life was meant to be.
It’s either ignorance or jealousy that makes a fan side a disproportinate number of times with the owner and against the player. Even when it’s the owners that lock the players out, you will hear a majority of the fans call that a player’s strike.
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