Ring: The human side of the Cubs’ Addison Russell decision
From Sheryl Ring at FanGraphs on December 5, 2018:
I’d like to ask your permission to depart from my normal subject. Usually, I tell you what the law says on a given matter. It may not seem like it, but the law doesn’t really account for what I think. Some of what I tell you is what I think is right, and some of the law I tell you about is the sort of thing that, were I able, I would strike as immoral, or stupid, or both. But the law generally doesn’t care what Sheryl Ring thinks of it, and while I do, in some of my cases, advocate for changes in the law, I’m not going to do that here.
This time, with your permission, I’m going to talk about feelings. My feelings. About why I love baseball. About why I have always loved baseball. And about how it impacts me when baseball doesn’t quite love me back. This piece is about the human cost of major league baseball teams employing alleged domestic abusers. This isn’t about policy; what MLB should do about the issue, I will leave for another day. This is about my stakes.
At its best, baseball can transport us to the place of hopes and dreams, where impossibly high barriers no longer seem insurmountable and mortal humans become giants. Baseball writing can do much the same, done well. Earlier this year, in a piece that still resonates with me, Meg Rowley said this:
Communities are home to all kinds of folks engaged in different bits of sin and kindness, all experiencing different stakes. We’re knit together by our sins and our kindnesses, sometimes quite uncomfortably. One such sin is the everyday kind, the sort of casual meanness and lack of care we all wade through all the time. It’s a smaller kind, but we still find ourselves altered by it.
It’s a passage I’ve found myself reflecting on this week after the Cubs made the decision to tender troubled and suspended shortstop Addison Russell a contract.
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-human-side-of-the-cubs-addison-russell-decision/
Originally published: December 6, 2018. Last Updated: December 6, 2018.