Over the last several years, simultaneously lauded and paralyzed by its ironclad traditions, baseball has undergone various forays into reinvention, trying to free itself from its unwritten rules of retaliation, its seeming aversion to joy, its demand that every generation of player of every culture and background play the game with the grimness of a Dust Bowl farmer.
The sport even attempted to change those customs by promoting a cultural shift with an industry-wide motto: Let the Kids Play. But in a time of intense division within the aggressive backdrop of Trumpism, the result is a racial clash that is actually a generational and cultural one that predates current politics by a century.
On Saturday night, Braves superstar Ronald Acuña Jr hit a third-inning home run off Zack Wheeler of the Phillies and floated around the bases, arms wide, imitating an airplane, Euro-stepping past third base as if he were Manu Ginobili, and infuriating Wheeler and his manager Don Mattingly with his apparent disregard for the accepted customs of the game.
A week before, in the midst of what would be a 16-1 rout, Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm swiped two meaningless bases in a blowout win over the Red Sox when the defense had conceded his presence â according to a 150-year-old custom, runners are expected to respect this courtesy by not advancing. Chisholmâs breach of protocol prompted Red Sox radio announcer Will Flemming to suggest on the air that a Yankee player drill one of Chisholmâs teammates for his insolence.
For the trifecta, during a Colorado-St Louis series this weekend, neither the Cardinals nor the Rockies had a problem with each other â but umpire Doug Eddings did, stopping the game to tell Cardinals rookie Hancel Rincon to adjust his hat. Eddings determined the rookieâs hat was too crooked (despite his later admission that Rincon had not violated any official rules) and Rincon would not disrespect his game on his field. Eddings then issued a time violation to the Cardinals when manager Oli Marmol complained, then ejected Marmol, and then missed an obvious call at the plate against the Cardinals.
In each of the incidents, the offended â Eddings, Wheeler (and to a lesser extent Mattingly), and Flemming â were white, while the alleged offenders â Acuña, Chisholm, Rincon, and Marmol â were Black or Latino. Periodically this season, baseball has found its way into the repellent culture wars, first during the World Baseball Classic earlier this year when the Americans soured the proceedings with their militia-like grimness when the rest of the world was having fun. Maybe war is all America has to offer these days.
In June, when participation was optional, several players decided to exercise their religious freedoms by crashing Pride Night by writing Bible passages on their hats. When the players were warned over the incident, the Department of Justice threatened to investigate whether baseball was discriminating against Christians.
If, however, it appears that baseball is an extension of Maga â and it very well may be â what Eddings and company have really resurfaced over the past is not exactly Trumpism per se, but what Trumpism tacitly demands: an incessant imposition of whiteness on American institutions, and an aggressiveness that emboldens the gatekeepers like Eddings to put the coloreds in their place.
No league forces its historical whiteness on its players like Major League Baseball. That whiteness is also known as âtradition,â of playing the game the right way. That tradition is practiced by players Black, white and Latino, who were raised in the old-school American baseball tradition with its ethnic, Depression-era seriousness. Other sports adjust to the new generations of players who enter the game. The NBAâs Nikola JokiÄ and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are not expected to play like George Mikan and John Havlicek. In baseball, Bob Gibson and Pedro MartĂnez are proudly the spiritual extensions of Rube Waddell and Walter Johnson.
Mattingly, wasnât happy with Acuña, but judging by his postgame comments his conflicts were not racial, or racist, but instead resigned to a baseball becoming unrecognizable to him â a carnival of bat flips and unprofessionalism masquerading as fun. Mattingly has been in the game nearly 50 years. He was teammates with the ultimate showman, Rickey Henderson, whose on-field expressions were loathed, but Mattingly knew Henderson was no clown. He also managed Yasiel Puig, who was electric but whose respect for his craft wavered. Mattingly knows the difference between being professional and not, joy and disrespect, and seemed to be lamenting the desperate blurring of the two at the encouragement of the people who run the sport.
In better times, when it didnât appear umpires were looking for a fight, and when baseball especially did not appear to enlist itself in harassing players of color â Eddings might have been shrugged off as another power-tripping umpire having a bad day and taking it out on a kid making his big-league debut and the manager telling him to âfucking grow up,â as Marmol did.
These are not better times. Eddings looked small and petty, and baseballâs strain of âplaying the right wayâ is usually code for its eternal conflicts with how Black and Latino players express themselves in competition, how they dress, celebrate, emote. Even in 2026, somewhere in baseball â as evidenced by Flemmingâs comments â it is always 1926 (he later apologized to Rincon, although that reportedly came after pressure from the league).
What, it should be asked, is this all about? It is an example of just how frayed the nerves of the country are, and what abuses of authority look like, especially as baseball in the backdrop of a Maga country feels like a hostile place. The Cardinals responded by protecting their player, and thumbing their nose at Eddings by tilting their hats as a team in solidarity. The small moments can provide the kind of kindling that can bring a team together (after five months of mediocrity, the Cardinals are trying to snag an 11th-hour playoff spot.)
As for Eddings, who later apologized, he resembled the doomed, peacocking general surrounded by enemy forces. Umpires have few friends these days. The humorous YouTube channel Jomboy, once an innocuous value-add for Yankee fans for its clever lip-reading of on-field incidents, became a viral sensation, and MLB, desperate to attract a younger audience, realized the telegraph isnât going to make a comeback and bought an equity stake in the company, transforming Jomboy from a clever fan site to an arm of MLB, which is not so innocuously trying to rid the game of human umpiring. In addition to Jomboy, numerous unofficial social media users virally spread umpiresâ worst calls, intensifying the drumbeat that umpiring in its current form needs to go the way of the flannel uniform.
Eddings spent this Labor Day weekend making another case for the robots, contributing simultaneously to baseballâs 100-year culture war and to the umpiresâ digging of their own graves.
