Baseball is a very silly sport.
Baseball is a sport where nine guys go stand on the field and throw things at each other and half of the guys wind up not running 30 percent of the time. It’s a sport that relies on college graduates tossing balls with the sort of strength that destroys their muscles and tendons and has success rates that look like engineering finals because good lord the guy hitting under .300 is somehow considered “incredible”.
So a lot of silly things have happened in baseball recently, and that’s my favorite part of this sport.
Firstly, let’s talk about the Savannah Bananas. Bananaball is the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, it’s a silly, dance-and-circus filled replacement for baseball started by a little team from Savannah, Georgia. It’s got backflipping umps, guys in tall stilts, and players taking their shirts off and not being kicked out.
Unlike the Globetrotters, who very, very rarely lost against their “rival” the Washington Generals, the Bananas have real competition against their rivals (the Party Animals). They play real games, they have to try, they recruit for both teams, it’s fun being a Banana.
And this weird sideshow sports team has somehow managed to sell out stadiums. They managed to fully sell out the Tamba Bay Buccaneers stadium, playing to a crowd of 65,000. From a team that played sandlot games in front of a couple grand, they’re selling out consistently. Bananaball is going big and it’s going to stay. I think.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, the sort of baseball that people make terrible gambling decisions on, there has been a watershed moment.
The New York Yankees have finally removed their no-facial-hair policy.
You don’t understand.
The New York Yankees have had this policy for nearly a half a century. Functionally speaking, the team has been full of baby-faced Bronx Bombers for decades, and suddenly, out of the blue, Steinbrenner and company have decided they want their players to look rugged and presentable. Move aside Justin Timberlake, it looks like George is bringing sexy back.
I’m honestly really excited about this decision. The Yankees have always had a specific look, and it’s shocking that this look is going to disappear, but at the same time, I want to see Aaron Judge in a beard.
After losing Soto, the Yankees might be doing this because baseball power is obviously stored in mutton chops, but, honestly, this seems just like the team acting like everyone else. Can’t complain about that.
And finally, we have to talk about the Tetas hat. No, bear with me, this is a real hat. MLB came out with a series of hats that put the logo of the team right on top of the team name. This led to the unfortunate realization that a lot of team logos very prominently feature the letter of the team name, and made brand new words instead. The Astros became the AsHos. The Boston Red Sox became the Bobon Red Sox. The Miami Marlins became the MMMI.
And the Texas Rangers became the Tetas Rangers.
And that’s really, really funny.
I am sure some of us are mature adults who do not find the “Tetas Rangers” hat funny. To those of you, I salute, for I am not nearly that strong — I am still giggling while writing this. I cannot believe that nobody in MLB looked at these hats until putting them online, and moreover, that nobody in an organization filled with people from Central and South America, noticed that the word on the hat was just the Spanish word for ‘tit’. C’mon guys, just like. Google translate it?
Regardless, it’s another in a glorious string of messes that MLB has been enjoying, and it’s making this whole sport so much more fun. I think everyone I know wants a Tetas Rangers hat, and I don’t blame them — they’re hilarious. And I want my favorite sport to be hilarious, because that makes baseball more fun. How can you not be romantic about baseball?
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