I Give To You, The Cockiest Home Run Celebration Of All-Time
Call off the search. This is the cockiest home run celebration of all-time, and I’m not sure that second place is even close.
That whole “baseball is dying” narrative has been a thing for quite some time now, and anybody with a brain should, at least, be able to see it from both sides. On the side of baseball actually dying, the numbers don’t lie. The average age of a baseball fan is somewhere in the 50’s, which is bad if you’re Rob Manfred. Yet, we just saw Major League Baseball set a record for the most revenue they’ve ever generated this past year at $10.3 billion. Back to the other side of the argument — while revenue is up, attendance is down.
What does all of this have to do with the clip shown above? Well, this is surely going to make the internet rounds tonight, tomorrow and hopefully forever because it’s that fuckin’ awesome. But wouldn’t it be nice if Major League Baseball had players who felt like it was okay to do shit like this without getting a fastball in the ear hole? And if players pulled stunts like this regularly, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to share it on your social media without MLB requesting that Twitter suspend or permanently ban your account for it? That’d be dope.
Baseball ain’t dead. It’s not on life support, either. But if you want the younger demo to pay attention, then take a page out of the NBA’s book and let the folks on social media who want to promote your product for free…promote your product for free. Embrace the flashy players who are giving strokes to the grumpy ass players from the 1970’s in their retirement homes, and let social media do its thing by getting their style of play in front of a whole new audience.
Hey, maybe even make some adjustments to the blackout restrictions so that people can actually watch their favorite teams wherever they are geographically, especially if they’re paying north of a hundred bucks a year for your streaming service.
Oh, and one more thing — maybe do something about the teams that sit back and collect their shares of this record revenue and then pretend they’re poor instead of reinvesting it in the roster, and doing everything that they can to put a competitive team on the field every year. It’s not that the sport is dying; it’s that you have too many goddamn teams who aren’t doing everything that they possibly can to field a team that’s worth buying a ticket to come out and see or watch on television.
Yes, there are a handful of problems, but there are also a handful of solutions. If a Major League Baseball player hit a home run and celebrated like that in a major league game, you’d more than likely have your most viewed/shared video of the year, especially if fans were actually allowed to share the highlight themselves. Think of all of the younger fans that something like that could attract. Maybe when the average age of a baseball fan gets into the 60’s, we’ll see some change.