Much like liberal political media, sports media have lost track of their purpose and become a collection of petulant whiners hoping to whip up controversy. They would rather outrage their readers than inform them.
The Athletic, the once interesting sports outlet that has been consumed by the New York Times, has a major story as baseball season kicks into gear. This story is a grand bit of news, “Important work,” according to one of its baseball reporters, Stephen Nesbitt. The groundbreaking piece of reporting is that the Texas Rangers have added a statue of a Texas Ranger to their stadium, which, of course, must be racist.
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The statue in dispute is a generic Texas Ranger that is said to be modeled after a particular Texas Ranger, Jay Banks. It is not a statue honoring Banks, to be clear. Writing for the Athletic, Sam Blum then delves into the history of Banks, who, again, supposedly served as the model for this statue of a generic Texas Ranger.
Now, I want you to picture yourself as a big baseball fan looking for baseball news on a particular day. The MLB season is about 20 games in, meaning first impressions of teams are being put to the test. You click over to the Athletic, a website that presumably covers sports, to look for news and analysis, and you are greeted with some 2,000 words about a man (who was not a baseball player) whose form may have served as the model for a statue of a generic law enforcement man to be put on display inside the ballpark of the Rangers.
The obvious question is: Who cares?
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This isn’t the kind of story that someone who follows baseball would care about, because it isn’t a baseball (or sports) story at all. This is the Athletic (which is owned by the New York Times) attempting to punish the Rangers for the organization’s perceived politics. This is made obvious because Blum uses some of those 2,000 or so words to whine that the Rangers didn’t do an “LGBTQ Pride Night,” played full capacity games during the COVID-19 pandemic, and didn’t boycott games over the death of George Floyd. It is more obvious when you remember that the national media want to force the Rangers to be renamed, claiming that their organizational identity is itself racist.
This piece would be a snoozer if the New York Times itself had published it. Coming from an ostensible sports outlet such as the Athletic, it is even more out of place. This is exactly the kind of liberal outrage-mongering that has overwhelmed legacy sports media, corrupting it into a tool of Democratic politics at the expense of people who simply want to keep up with their favorite teams and favorite leagues. Legacy sports media care less about sports than they do about pushing the liberal activist ball forward, and that is why the Athletic has decayed to the point that this is considered “important work.”