There went those ideas. Ideas such as writing about how Clayton Kershaw and the Los Angeles Dodgers picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, started all over again with an even-up World Series, and pushed themselves to one game short of the Promised Land Sunday night.
From Mookie Betts's game-opening triple to Corey Seager's immediate RBI single. From Joc Pederson's third inning-opening bomb to Max Muncy's two-out, just-out-of-reach placing fifth-inning flog. From Kershaw's determined five and two thirds innings with less than the absolute best of his repertoire to the Rays' tenacity to the Game 5 finish. And, to both bullpens throwing zeros on the scoreboard.
That's what I wanted to write about. But no. I had to learn some bunches of human scum just had to paste Kenley Jansen with the kind of thing that would be considered obscene in Sodom, Gomorrah, and the worst little whorehouse anywhere.
In the wake of Game 4's extraterrestrial climax in the Rays' Series-tying favor, Jansen's Instagram account was flooded with racist insults, which are grotesque enough, and death threats against him, which are low enough. But the flood also included threats against his wife and children, for which there's no redemption for those so dehumanized as to level them in the first place.
I'd like to say that that kind of degeneracy is a brand new phenomenon, but I know better. Didn't I remember the anniversary of Joe Carter's 1993 Series-winning 3-run homer off Mitch Williams a few days ago by recalling, among other things, Williams receiving death threats after he'd blown a save in Game 4 of that set? And I'm not naive enough to think it began with Williams, either.
I'm old enough to remember when Hall of Famer Henry Aaron required security and the FBI's close surveillance when he lived and played under the specter of racial insults, hate mail, and death threats. Not because he'd tried and failed on baseball's biggest stage but because he had the audacity to challenge and succeed in passing Babe Ruth on the lifetime home run list.
You almost don't want to imagine what Aaron would require from the cyberspacious descendants of such creatures if he were chasing the Babe under today's social media scrutiny. At least the racist hate and death-threat mail didn't arrive his way within about three seconds after it was posted.
Jansen has not performed without his postseason struggles over his career. Few enough Dodgers who've seen their regular-season dominance for eight years running collapse in those postseasons have. Being a black man by itself is enough to provoke too many who lack the brains God conferred upon a paramecium.
But what the hell could Jansen have done to provoke racist death threats?
Was it merely throwing the fastball that cruised off the middle of the plate, right into Rays pinch hitter Brett Phillips's bat, and off the gloves of both center fielder Chris Taylor and catcher Will Smith as the tying and winning Rays runs crossed the plate Saturday night?
Was it Jansen's inexplicable lapse in not backing the plate after Muncy's relay throw to Smith down the first base line bumped off his mitt and behind the plate, before Smith swept around to tag a Randy Arozarena who hadn't yet arrived to within forty feet of the plate after an unlikely trip and tumble before he scored the winner?
Was it Jansen's apparent postgame indifference about the lapse when talking to postgame reporters?
About throwing the pitch Phillips swatted to start that Three Stooges-like climax, reality check. It's far too easy to hammer a pitcher leaving a meatball out over the plate but far too difficult to remember that he didn't exactly say to himself, "This see-saw needs to go bumper cars."
Show me the pitcher who delivers intending for what he throws to be hit into right center field, left center field, the bleachers, or out of town, and I'll show you a pitcher who knows better than to take the mound in a professional baseball game in the first place.
Jansen's not the first and won't be the last experienced pitcher to get caught in the middle of a jaw-to-the-floor ninth-inning shock and find himself on the wrong side of the plate area when he should have been behind it backing whatever play might come. His being there might not have stopped the winning run, or it might have forced the game to extra innings.
We didn't know in the moment. We'll never know. On strict baseball terms, it's fair game to criticize Jansen for not being where he belonged. It's fair game to question whether the moment's shock knocked his concentration out just long enough. Playing race cards and suggesting he and his family deserve execution over it is so far beyond those bounds you shouldn't even be able to imagine it, never mind have to see it.
Jansen also isn't the first and won't be the last veteran unable to say, simply, that he'd made a bad mistake not backing the play. He isn't the first and won't be the last to find no words for Phillips floating his unintended meatball into right center other than what equals, "It is what it was."
Wasn't it possible that what Jansen tried to say though his tongue betrayed him was, hey, this was only Game 4, we've just got to shake it off and come out to play tomorrow? If it was, did he deserve a social media scum bath?
Teasing over his prior postseason puncturings is one thing. Go ahead, tell the world that the minute you see him warming up in the pen you want to get blind drunk, call your analyst, or stick your head in the oven. Those may not be in good taste but at least they don't cross the line into human degeneracy.
As an orator, Jansen isn't exactly James Earl Jones. (For the record, he's not African American, either, as if that's a distinction with a difference to the racist — he's native to Curacao and, with his wife and children, lives there with his parents in the offseasons.) He won't sell out auditoriums speaking of the magical waters into which baseball's dreamers dip as they come to the Field of Dreams and reunite with the heroes of their increasingly distant youths.
Yet there still remain creatures among us who think even that's a capital crime.
We watch and love baseball because it speaks as no other sport does to our aspirations, our need to wander and explore, our need to come home from our wanderings and explorations. No other major sport defines its scoring that way. You score touchdowns and field goals in football. You sink baskets on the hard court. In golf, it don't mean a thing if it got too many swings before you sink one into a hole. In racing, you cross a certain line or (if you're a horse) hit the wire.
But A. Bartlett Giamatti was so right about what happens when the umpire says "play ball!" — long as you travel and as far as you roam, your job is to come home. You don't always control the journey. You know nothing at the outset of the pitfalls, pratfalls, and powder kegs awaiting you, nor do you know when they'll meet you and just what triumph or disaster awaits.
You might reconsider those before you continue watching sports as though success and triumph equal godlike transcendence, failure and loss equal irredeemable character absence, and the defeated deserve to lose their lives. Freedom of speech allows anyone to make an ass of him or herself. To those crossing that line into the sewers of racism and death threats, three words: go to hell.
Jansen lingered in the Dodger bullpen during Sunday night's Game 5 knowing he wasn't in the game's pitching plans and leaning now and then against the bullpen fence. Looking somewhere between thoughtful and troubled. If he tortured himself trying to conjugate how the hell to err is human, but to forgive is not fan policy, you can't blame him.
Even an obscurity such as me can spend over almost four thousand words trying. And I still have no more idea whether I succeeded than I have that anyone gives a single damn what I think.
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