New Age Political Player

May 12, 2010

The New York Times

By Doug Glanville

As we all know, in the arid world of Arizona, political temperatures have been rising about a new law that makes it a crime to be without immigration papers, and relies heavily on “reasonable suspicion.” The reaction within the professional sports world would have been unheard of in my playing days, and underlines a real generational gap. In an unprecedented show of solidarity, players, owners and front-office personnel are uniting, disgusted by Arizona’s approach to addressing concerns over the undocumented.

The White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillen, has spoken out. Mets catcher Rod Barajas has spoken out. Basketball’s Grant Hill and Steve Nash have not minced words about their opposition. The entire Phoenix Suns organization has banded together to protest and oppose the measure.

Throughout time in pro sports, players have tacitly understood that you have to be careful with your opinions. Especially political ones. These shared the same taboos found in any workplace: don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion.

Part of the reason was because your career could disappear if one of the decision-makers in your organization didn’t like what you had to say. In pro sports, you are truly a blink away from having to find other employment. Sure, injury is a big part of its capricious nature, but so are the whims of opinion that could suddenly make you null and void — and the guy in the next locker, the future.

In so many organizational cultures in sports, the ownership is the invisible smoke in the room. You feel its presence, you know it is there, but you can’t find it, you can’t relate to it, you can’t talk to it, even though it is changing the chemistry all around you. And you cannot possibly know what impact your public opinions can have on how you will be perceived. Because even in the sports world, perception — not just your batting average — is reality.

I often wondered how my deep involvement in the Major League Baseball Players Association would be taken. Would owners around the league see me as a thorn in their side? It would have been one thing if I’d batted .300 every year and was an invaluable part of ticket sales, but what if I was fighting for a better collective bargaining agreement after a season when I hit .210? There’s no way for a player to know what is in the heart and mind of his team’s owner.

When I was in Philadelphia, David Montgomery, the Phillies’ owner, surprised me. After I’d done a tough TV interview in an attempt to explain the Players Association’s reasoning for contemplating a strike in 2002, he let me know that he appreciated my fairness. Yet I still wondered: should I not have a job in Philadelphia at the end of the season, would the other 29 teams feel the same way?

Even as we worked on collective bargaining agreements, we heard stories of some teams that were much more aggressive in fighting the players association. Were players who were active in the union getting a scarlet letter from those organizations? Did that sentiment spill over into the expression of political opinions? Would they have been able, for instance, to speak out against immigration policy without damaging their career curve?

Public political neutrality was the norm when I was playing, though it must have been exponentially more difficult in baseball’s earlier years to say much of anything. Players in the 1950s were receiving pay cuts on a whim even after productive years, so forget about aggravating the boss.

But even to my ‘90s ears, it was shocking to see the Phoenix Suns uniting against the Arizona law so vehemently that they donned “Los Suns” uniforms for Cinco de Mayo. The San Antonio Spurs wanted to do the same, but they couldn’t get the order done in time.

So how is it that in today’s game, players can speak out and not only be embraced, but get the endorsement from their front office and ownership group?

I think there are different expectations for — and of — players coming up today. Certainly different from what I experienced. In the age of Facebook, Twitter and so many social networks, suppressed opinion has, along with privacy, fallen by the wayside. This generation expects their opinions to be heard. It may seem frivolous when someone Twitters about their pet canary Chester’s leg acne, but lurking behind the minutiae is the attitude that their opinion matters — and if they ever attain a more visible and powerful podium, the world will know, too.

In the wake of the horror of 9/11 the idea of privacy underwent a monumental shift: it was traded for a player to be named immediately, and that player was security. A generation of young people grew up understanding that their lives were going to be an open book, and the social networking culture grew rapidly with that understanding.

Many of today’s players are those 12– to 18-year-olds from a decade ago, and they didn’t see the erosion of privacy as a loss, but rather as an invitation to be open.

As a result, today’s players have a voice, and it is never off, never toned down for a minute. You tweet, you post, and the world listens. Baseball, with more young general managers like Josh Byrnes in Arizona and Jon Daniels in Texas, is even more with the times and more likely to embrace the culture of the player. They understand that everyone is an enterprise, and that collective enterprise can effect change in a micro-minute.

We will see how things in Arizona will play out in the coming days and weeks. But regardless, public political neutrality for the athletes has gone out the window. In many ways, it is historic, maybe a paradigm shift for how players see and use their voice. It will go through challenges, most likely swerving left and right for a while, but if nothing else, you will know where everyone stands — and there is something refreshing about that.

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