Once again, ESPN is trying to ruin a professional sport. Like a drug addict, the biggest problem is that they don’t even realize that their actions are hurting not only them, but everyone around them as well. They did it with Bryce Harper. They did it with Mark Sanchez. They did it with Jeremy Lin. What am I talking about? Two words: Yasiel Puig.
To the uninitiated, those two words may sound like gibberish. Yasiel Puig is the baseball-playing phenom currently putting on a show for the Los Angeles Dodgers. As of this writing, he’s played in the majors for all of six weeks. So how is ESPN ruining this for everyone? Well, the folks at the acronym sports station have decided to throw the might of the sports empire behind putting Puig on the National League All Star Team.
Okay, let’s get some history out of the way before we go any further. Let’s go back eleven years…in 2002, the All Star Game was held in Milwaukee. As is baseball’s new tradition, the game was awarded to cities with new ball parks, and Milwaukee had just opened Miller Park in 2001. So the NL and AL All Stars met in Milwaukee to play an exhibition game featuring the most popular players in the league. At the start of the 11th inning, both teams were running out of pitchers, and the score was tied 7-7. The managers met with Bud Selig at the pitcher’s mound and decided that, if the NL did not score in the bottom of the inning, the game would be declared a tie.
The National League did not score. The game was declared a tie. Trash littered the field at Miller Park. Fans cried out for refunds and expressed their desire for Bud Selig to no longer be the commissioner of baseball. Afterwards, in what I recently called the sports version of the mother of all knee-jerk reactions, Major League Baseball decided that the All Star Game should mean something. To that end, they reached an agreement with the Players Union that the winning league of the All Star Game would gain home field advantage in that year’s World Series. This would be like saying the team with the best Spring Training record would be spotted a five-game lead in their division, because they played so well when it didn’t count. Back to the present…
The Dodgers brought up Yasiel Puig on June 2. He made his debut on June 3. I’ll not take anything away from Puig. He’s been the very definition of en fuego, to borrow an old ESPN cliché. But his call up was too late for his name to appear on an All Star ballot. He still received over 800,000 write-in votes. His name was added to the list of players for the All Star Final Vote, a player that is voted on to fill the final roster spot.
ESPN has seemingly picked up the Yasiel Puig banner, to the potential detriment of Ian Desmond, Freddie Freeman, Adrian Gonzalez, and Hunter Pence. Freddie Freeman, the first baseman for the Atlanta Braves, currently leads the Final Vote tally, but that is in spite of ESPN’s desire. Radio hosts are constantly pushing Puig. Jonathon Coachman, of Coach & Company, has completely denigrated Atlanta sports fans and lambasted the fact that Freeman holds the lead. If it were up to ESPN, no other player would even be considered.
Some people point to last season, when Bryce Harper won the All Star Final Vote. Harper, though, had played since April 27, nearly six weeks earlier than Puig's call up date. Harper, though, is another ESPN prodigy.
A similar thing happened in 2012 in the NBA. Jeremy Lin, point guard then of the New York Knicks, went on a tear. Prior to that time, he was little known in the American sports environment, but his actions during that stretch of February 2012 brought him to near-global fame, sparking the Linsanity movement…all because of ESPN. There was talk of Lin, who had played less than 50 career games at the time, being a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Where? You guessed it…ESPN.
In 2009, the NFL Draft rolled around and ESPN decided that Mark Sanchez was the heir-apparent to the throne of the NFL. Through their reporting, they bolstered Sanchez from a mid-1st Round pick to a top five pick. They praised the New York Jets for trading away three players, a 2nd Round pick and a 1st Round pick for Sanchez. The result: Sanchez may lose his starting job this season to a rookie. He had only started 16 games in the PAC-10, but that was enough for ESPN to label him the next big thing.
ESPN has a track record of choosing players to be their favorites. They settle on a player and then use the might of the ESPN Empire to create a scenario in which that player is protected from any criticism while simultaneously propping him up. They do it during the Draft. They do it during the season. Now, they're doing it for a game that shouldn't even matter.
I'll admit, my biggest gripe with this whole situation is the fact that a guy who has played six weeks for a last place team may end up deciding which league get home field advantage in the Fall classic.
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