Jorge Soler's Home Run vs. the White Rapture
Joe Buck's joyless home run call speaks for an entire cohort
Baseball, in spite of all of its flaws, and tedium, and innate inability to progress unless dragged kicking and screaming through the wide-open door by a handful of men—all of whom are of color—continues to show us interesting things.
It’s a neat trick, this sleight of hand white imperialist move that has worked so well for so many generations of mediocre gentry who sit in the stands and still do the tomahawk chop and cheer loudest for a deposed demagogue even though they know deep down it’s the wrong thing to do.
They do what they do best which is to continue to move the bar in the name of subtle moral outrage (in this case when it comes to men of color finding joy on the field), and then despite all the hand-wringing, they witness something they never have before, and it comes in the form of not just progress, but progression.
And then they take credit for it.
Today's Atlanta Braves fan spit on Jackie Robinson, now they wear his jersey one day a year.
They mocked and booed Willie Mays and the plays he could make. And then eventually gave up, permanently changing the dimensions of ballparks and bringing in the fences because they knew, in the end, he would always win.
They laughed at Hank Aaron, then threatened his life.
They made jokes about Roberto Clemente falling from the sky.
They armed an entire region’s press corps and infused accusations with racist undercurrents—refusing to give up the narrative that the game's prodigal son Barry Bonds was the only one using the same drugs that the entire game was benefitting from at the time.
And, most recently, they turned their nose up and said the flash and wit and out-and-out-charm—the joie de vivre of Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Céspedes, a pair of Cuban emigrants— was unsportsmanlike.
This, of course, the end game of their form; to take a spirited, wholesome way of showmanship and turning it into something bad—the most joyless form of white oppression.
The bland opposition to a black man from a different country having fun with it all came up again, this time in a historical context last night.*
Jorge Soler, who hit a home run so big and so beautiful that it went into orbit and knocked down a couple of satellites and rattled off a billionaire’s penis rocket before climbing the ladder back down to Earth; a supernova delivered off his bat signaling not only his arrival on our stage but also making him the first Cuban-born Willie Mays World Series MVP since Liván Hernández in 1997 was met nearly with rebuke from the booth.
Soler is The Cinderella story of a generation. A midseason acquisition, a journeyman who was rotting away in Kansas City.
Soler, a desperate attempt by the Braves organization to jumpstart their lineup with some offense after they lost superstar Ronald Acuña Jr., the NL Rookie of the Year in 2018, who on July 10 tore his right ACL.
Soler, who was sidelined for Game 4 of the NLDS against the Brewers and the first four games of the NLCS against the Dodgers following a positive test for COVID-19, delivered on all the promise of those who came before them and then elevated it right out of the ballpark going 6-for-20 with a three home runs, six RBIs and a 1.191 OPS to lead all hitters in the World Series.
But it was Soler's at-bat last night, a single swing against Luis Garcia that will live on forever, or at least as long as there are people around to remember.
The game was knotted at zero in the top of the third of game 6, and Atlanta, playing tight against the historically loathsome Houston Astros, had two on.
Soler got one inside, turned on it in a very Bondsian way, and hit a go-ahead three-run shot into the night sky; a home run so embarrassing in its proportions that the batsman could only do what any of us mere mortals could—he stopped, admired, and pointed to his chest toward the dugout. It was on. and It was over. He began to float around the basepaths.
Audio up.
*It should be noted here that Joe Buck, the somnolent Gen-X failson, the Simba king of the once-a-year know-nothings in the network broadcast booth, the very embodiment of square-jawed entitlement and giant forehead nepotism, ordered up the home run call like he was sleepwalking through a pre-9 a.m. transaction at Starbucks. A truly historic moment, for the game, for a generation of its players who’ve fought so hard not just to be a part of its fabric, but to infuse their style of play with acceptance earning the embrace, not ridicule. He served up the call with a huge slab of mayo on top, completely watering down the moment and making it palpable, I guess, for the remaining .02 share that was still tuning in in North America. Shame, shame on us for rolling over and accepting a Joe Buck for all these decades. We not only can do better, we deserve more.
“I knew I hit it well, but to be honest, immediately after I hit it, I turned around just to look at our dugout and start celebrating,” Soler said. “So I didn’t really see it go all the way out.”
And that’s what it is. That’s what I’ll remember, a celebration. A brief moment when a man who had no business being in that situation rose to the occasion then climbed to altitude and circled above it. And we're all the better for being on that ride.
When Soler returned to the dugout, he was wholly embraced by his teammates, a multi-cultural, multi-national affair, jamming around, holding one another up, celebrating because playing this many games in a time of disease and dismay and division is obscene—I felt better for a moment for all the reasons that sports give us that one free pass to feel something besides despair.
We continue to barrel into the darkest of times. None of this is normal. Our brains are broken, and this country is awash in the mythology of a cohort whose bedrock of their beliefs in a story of a magic man of two thousand years ago who apparently—in their incarnation at least—wanted women to not have agency over their own bodies and thought that the rest of us should be capitalist whores whose mission is to make our children and our old and parma-sick with a now-preventible disease, for a planet in peril to die the death of one million careless incidents to feed the incinerator of greed.
They prefer pain, misery, martyrdom, rapture. They cheer Soler in the stands, and then they want him dead or displaced the next day in the streets. Joy for them, misery for others is their religion.
That’s baseball. That’s America. Ain’t it grand.