Ken Rosenthal has been writing about baseball, and baseball players, since Abner Doubleday did not invent the game, or so it seems. It's why Fox hired him as a dugout reporter, because he's been there and seen that and knows up from down as well as anyone.
This did not stop the San Diego Padres from essentially banning him from their dugout last night, according to the website Awful Announcing.
It happened because Rosenthal, in his other gig as a baseball reporter for The Athletic, wrote a column the Pads didn't care for. In it, he said Manny Machado throwing a baseball into the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout the other day was a "punkish response" to L.A. pitcher Jack Flaherty hitting Fernando Tatis Jr. earlier in the game.
"Manny being Manny," Rosenthal called this.
That's because it was.
And that's because it was a punkish response.
Rosenthal also wrote Machado wasn't the only irritating Padre, that Nando can be a "smiling, dancing peacock," and that Jurickson Profar is like the kid who pulls the fire alarm at school and then says, "Who, me?".
Pretty tame stuff, with the added benefit of being true in Machado's case. Or at least I think it's tame stuff, if the opinion of a cranky codger who worked the sports beat for 40 years matters at all.
Nonetheless, the Padres got their shorts in a bunch about it, and refused to talk to Rosenthal.
In my day (while walking to school uphill both ways through the snow, natch) we would have called this "touchy." We also would have called the Padres a bunch of pansies, except we wouldn't have used the word "pansies."
Look. I get it. I do. It's a different time now, and athletes and organizations look down on us from Olympian piles of money which have given them a sense of entitlement outsized even by their standards. You'd think that would make them especially immune to the slings and arrows of mere mortals, but all it seems to have done is make them ... well, more touchy about them.
As in: "How dare mere mortals fire slings and arrows at us. They're mere mortals!"
I say this because the Rosenthal incident comes on the heels of the NFLPA wanting to ban reporters from its locker rooms, and from the WNBA players association getting all outraged because a highly decorated reporter asked a question the WNBPA deemed inappropriate.
No, wait. They deemed it "indecent."
This after Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington swiped at a Caitlin Clark pass during a first-round playoff game and got Clark in the eye with a fingernail. This immediately fired up the noxious "look-at-that-black-animal-picking-on-the-poor white-girl" crowd, who swore it was intentional even though it clearly wasn't.
Or at least it was clear to anyone who wasn't trying to mine some phony narrative.
Anyway, because Carrington had been less than complimentary of Clark in the past (more fuel for the phony narrative), the reporter in question, Christine Brennan of the Washington Post, asked Carrington in the postgame if the eye-poke was, in fact, intentional.
It was a completely legitimate question, given the context. And the reason it was legitimate is because it was Christine Brennan asking it. Christine Brennan generally doesn't ask questions just to stir up s***, despite what the WNBPA believes.
Brennan, it claimed in a statement was attempting "to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic and misogynistic vitriol on social media."
Well, no one wants that.
If that's what Brennan was actually trying to do, she deserved to be called out for it. Unfortunately for the WNBPA, it didn't look that way to anyone else -- or least to those of us who've sat in postgames uncounted times and asked elephant-in-the-room questions of those best equipped to answer them.
As one of the two principals involved in the play, Carrington was certainly that. You can fault Brennan for then asking if Carrington was laughing on the bench about it, because that might have been trying to stir up s***.
But the initial question merely gave Carrington the opportunity, on the record, to deny the phony narrative. It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still trying to figure out how that was a bad thing. And how it was Brennan being "indecent."
All I keep coming back to is what I said at the top of this: Everybody's touchy these days. This is especially of the WNBA, whose players and coaches are learning that the welcome spotlight Clark has focused on their league comes with sometimes less-than-welcome scrutiny, too. You don't get one without the other.
Even if it's mere mortals bringing it.
