Based-Ball: Breaking Out of the Matrix of the Agreeable
Shohei’s dog high-fives him after “throwing out” the first pitch – https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/watch-shohei-ohtani-dog-high-204214804.html
“Ah but maybe she just has to sing for the sake of the song. Who do I think that I am to decide that she's wrong?”
-Townes Van Zandt
The term, based, is credited to the rapper Lil B. From his Wikipedia page, it denotes “a lifestyle of positivity, impudence or boldness.” Being based, for instance, can mean Trevor Bauer doing a sword celebration with a menacing, anti-social glare at the opposing hitter, but it can also state, in a calm, frank and open tone, “I like playing with Star Wars Legos.” It wouldn’t be based to state you like playing with Star Wars Legos if you were vying to seem quirky or rare. That would be affectation. Being based isn’t the absence of ego, it’s being egoic without pretense. The outcome may appear villainous or repugnant, but the intent comes from a soft-heart – an almost-humble, dutiful decision to play your role as a human-being, regardless of rewards or recompense. The common thread through both examples is positivity, but that doesn’t mean the cloying, caption-able kind of modern self-help quotes. It means that, in a world of hiding and concealment (the negative), one has a duty to play their role out in the open. Being based is the antithesis of propaganda – it’s breaking ranks with the comfortable party line, and, specifically, not just for the sake of being different.
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Baseball has added a pitch clock, banned sticky stuff and steroids, and we've got a faster and fairer product. From anime MLB shorts to “baseball Zen”, or whatever new quirk Shohei’s dog is up to in Los Angeles, MLB’s made a pivot to bring people in. Its efforts have created more of a culture than a mythos around the sport of baseball, opting for the neon color explosion of the next cover of The Show over the slow rhythm of a radio broadcast chess match. This adds excitement and starts to bring more eyes to a shinier baseball diamond. Internationally, the WBC is getting bigger and MLB’s locked in the Japanese market – all but turning the NPB into the Triple-A affiliate for some of its teams. Domestically, hometown trope home-run celebration props add a little dugout theater in creative and local ways. There’s a huge uptick in fan-pandering populism and that’s not a bad thing. One may like or dislike it, but it’s hard to call it a mistake – it’s a market. Nominally, creating a more advertisable product is the prerogative of stakeholders. At least, this is one way to look at it.
Boston Red Sox Wally Head home run celebration – https://www.threads.com/@redsox
No one wants to be “old man yells at cloud” – the meme-famed elder Simpson getting mad at young things. But, it feels like MLB’s main move is to pull fans in via addition through subtraction: cut out unfairness, splice in some marginally-larger bases, and, hopefully, sans-steroids, help hitting talent catch up to modern velocity — all of this packaged up in a faster-to-digest product. All that is a good thing, nominally. However, in all of the push for fairness and a happy shiny product to please everyone, it feels like baseball has become obsessed with the culture of the agreeable.
Indeed, foul pole distance withstanding, on a literally fairer playing field, there seems to be a commensurate push for social fairness. I don’t mean this politically or as a Rawls vs. Nozick debate of material equality. In a purely social sense, and, literally, it seems that agreeableness has become the prized currency for aiding one’s employment chances. From LinkedIn lingo to player celebrations, it seems like everyone’s paycheck depends on how safe and even-keel they can be. The most edgy take on someone’s LinkedIn post might be a virtue signal about enjoying a particularly unhealthy food or mid-level binge-worthy TV show, about which they’re only somewhat embarrassed about sharing their ‘embarrassment’. This trait of modern human affairs – safely curated optics and agreeable politeness – isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the opposite isn’t always better. But, there is a subtle tension to it all, like a careful game is being played where no one wants to be negative. It can feel like everyone’s wearing a mask, afraid to be their character. At best, this caution can be democratic and respectful, but it can also grow stale, boring, saccharine and fake – rather than candid and alive. At worst, it can almost feel oppressive of the real. It isn’t lost on me that this piece itself could be culpable in turning based or realness into just another be yourself trope. But, that’s the real battle we all get to fight inside.
Though the MLB has dodged the helmet-stamped platitude slogans of the NBA and NFL so far, this agreeable culture shows up as an almost dogmatic aversion to being offensive. No, again, this isn’t Stan Marsh’s grandpa pining for political incorrectness. It’s deeper than that. Saying edgy things for the sake of doing so isn’t based – it’s a re-brand of the same fake-performativeness – just from a different side of zero. It’s dying to be noticed, not living in the story.
Yasiel Puig licks bat during 2017 World Series at-bat – https://www.mlb.com/video/puig-licks-bat-repeatedly-c1865332583
Far gone are the days of Mark Fidrych’s wing flap taunting opposing hitters, or Bob Gibson daring batters to dig in. No one is comfortable with being the bad guy. The last gasp and most modern iteration of these real, “here I am” types seems to me Yasiel Puig’s bat licks and maybe Fernando Rodney’s skyward bow after a clutch save. Recently, the closest thing MLB has had to a bad guy narrative is the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. Personality-wise, you could maybe throw in Fernando Tatis Jr.’s aura – maybe Carlos Correa’s “it’s my time” playoff bat flips or Soto’s shuffle. The last actually-intense in-game fight was between Bryan Abreu and Adolis García in the 2023 ALCS. The quick player punishments doled out to Abreu and Garcia only showcase a deep fear of something like that ever happening again. We probably won’t see another Jason Varitek and A-Rod prizefight in our lifetime.
Everything is mic’d up, safe, and cautious. That’s cool in a High School Musical sort of way, but every real story needs conflict. I love a good mic’d up segment, but at what point does the excitement of hearing the voice of your heroes feel like eaves-dropping, or worse, surveillance? I remember a game from 2024 when Jeremy Peña was mic’d up on the broadcast and made an error on a routine play. A sullen, guilty silence overtook the broadcast until the commercial break as Peña said nothing more.
What’s the cost of making a fielding mistake on the diamond? Demotion or DFA. But a personality mistake – violating the law of the agreeable – this could spell fines, criticism, or in rare cases like Trevor Bauer’s, a de facto ban from the MLB despite no criminal conviction. It’s a stretch to say that this is orchestrated or something of that tin foil nature. Regardless, in the background of all of the hype of the modern game, the perpetual friendly smile starts to look like a wince – a lamb’s blood painted on the door of one’s face to say, “nothing disagreeable to see here, please pass over.”
Over time, the plastered smiles over the dull roar of caricatured competition becomes the kitsch that Milan Kundera described in his seminal work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To him, kitsch isn’t tacky decorations or a weird style. It’s “a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist.” Outkast may have said it better in Roses. For Kundera, however, kitsch is really about totalitarian kitsch, where “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Indeed, things do feel scripted, sometimes. The market demands agreeableness as the prime asset for keeping one’s job in a very public society, where every thought is timestamped in digital resin. No one dares to be the villain. But in a world of no villains, can there really be a hero? Since no one is directly responsible for this vibe shift, it takes a look inside at who we really are as people.
Across faiths and philosophies, there’s a shared, wise adage: spot it, you got it. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line of good and evil cuts through the heart of every man.” This idea doesn’t stop abruptly at, “Hey! You’re guilty, too!”. Again, it goes deeper than that. MLB doesn’t need someone to be a bad person. It needs people to be themselves. As said before, one has to be careful here: that, be yourself line can itself become platitude: the droning, recited, party line for the tamed comrades. If spoken aloud, it runs the danger of becoming a vague cultural slogan that means nothing, watering down the individual in an ironic maelstrom that leaves realness and coolness adrift. Where we meant to highlight individual effort, quirks or cool-factors, we ended up with the widget factory of the blasé – churning out lukewarm smiles and limp high-fives. We want players to dare to show off, to be disagreeable, to be mean, to over-celebrate, to taunt and really mean it, to run the risk of being disliked.
Javier Bardem’s character ominously pursues Woody Harrelson in “No Country for Old Men” – https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2016/09/15/albuquerque-takes-over-empty-no-country-old-men-motel/90436824/
When you watch No Country for Old Men, Javier Bardem’s character makes you flinch. His psychopathic cattle prod kill shot is surgical and cold. His haircut is childish and eerie. He’s cruel to innocents. You fear that he’ll knock on your front door at any moment. But, it takes Javier Bardem’s sacrifice and diligent acting to create that reaction. In UFC, you get Conor McGregor who one could argue made the UFC what it is. Sure, we can all look back now and talk about the honorable warriors like Anderson Silva paving the way, but, if we can get past the disdain for a polarizing man like Conor, and go to a more meditative place – a place beyond ideas of good and bad – one can see that he really did play the villain, and that that was a good thing. That villainy made the UFC exciting. Would he dethrone the noble, devout Khabib? No. Would this cocky little Irishman defeat the world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. at his own sport? No, but it made both Conor and Floyd generational wealth in a single night – and helped launch a culture obsessed with the UFC like never before. It wasn’t just his skill, it was his willingness to play or be – however your opinion of him wants to look at it – the role of the villain. If that sentence itself is disagreeable, ask yourself, doesn’t such a strong reaction to a name like Conor McGregor prove his character adds more to the story of life? For better or worse, didn’t his swaggering press conferences and invective tweets give us more to talk about with co-workers than just another half-smile from a different fighter?
Conor McGregor at pre-Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight press conference in London – https://www.latimes.com/sports/boxing/la-sp-mcgregor-rise-20170820-story.html
Going back to the spot it, you got it: I believe that in everyone, there exists a part of our heart that is deeply ashamed of others seeing the Conor McGregor within us, just as there exists a part of us that revels in that person, the one that loves the thrilling, heady air of fearing no one on earth – even if that confidence makes us the bad guy. All of those energies – the villain, the hero, the prodigal son, the humble father – coexist within myself. I’d offer here that the MLB’s lack of realness has less to do with media, markets, or other vague shit, and has more to do with our aversion to it in the first place — to go back to Kundera and kitsch. People, deep down, are scared of death and ashamed of being kicked out of the tribe. In modern times, these fears show up as needing to fill silence with chit-chat or a podcast, or as fear of losing one’s income, one’s reputation. Imagine a morning where perhaps you drank a little too much and said something a little embarrassing or out-of-pocket the night before. Upon awakening, there is this cringing, cautious recoil like an armadillo under the blankets – I just want to disappear and blend in. Maybe this is what the safe smiles are really saying — the lamb’s blood on the door to deflect the Angel of Death.
Perhaps it’s because baseball is a game of failure that players are more reticent to really let their character show. Unlike the NFL and the NBA, where you’ve got Terrel Owens touchdown celebrations of old and Steph Curry rocking the baby to sleep, baseball puts enough pressure on a player to even crack the roster. Celebrating too hard after a double might draw too much attention from the punitive “baseball gods”, as people like to say – like Frodo putting on the Ring and drawing the glare of Sauron’s eye. Maybe it’s the length of the season that diffuses the panache of the clutch hit across 162 games. I don’t think so. Players have played the villain before, with less money at stake.
It’s not that baseball needs violence or bigots. It’s that baseball needs a story, not propaganda. The agreeable culture becomes almost totalitarian, to the point where it’s frowned upon to question the agreed-upon story line. Social media has brought our players close to us, but it has also brought our judgement – the determinant of their income – closer to them.
It’s on the players to be themselves. That’s how we’re made. The most exciting characters across time are those that aren’t afraid of lost money or popularity. ‘Exciting’ works both as notorious and revered – and that’s the point. Being real gives the story something to talk about with a real plot rather than party lines. That’s why people prefer Prince to politicians. People that are unapologetically themselves – without turning that trait itself into a t-shirt or moniker – those people are based. They get us actually excited and make us feel actually alive. Baseball needs it. It needs a Bauer, a Conor McGregor, a swaggering, fur-coated and big steak-eating Great Bambino calling his shot – not another nonplussed, polite walk-off. Baseball needs someone to step up and be willing to make the sacrifice of being the story again. It doesn’t need nine innings of dabbing up the opposing first baseman on a single, or putting on a fuzzy, ill-fitting, kid’s birthday party-ish Wally the Green monster hat after hitting a meaningless mid-season homer against a last-place team. Dare to be cool. I get it; money is at risk here, but in the end, we’re on stage for God, not endorsements. Play your part and put on the best show you can – because in the end, that’s all it really is.
