If you haven’t heard, Mickey Callaway cussed out a beat writer yesterday, with dubious provocation.
And obviously, this isn’t an ok thing to do. I don’t know anything about the writer in question, but in general, yelling expletives at someone doing their job falls somewhere between unnecessary and abusive.
But.
Haven’t we all wanted to scream profanities at a sportswriter from time to time?
Journalism is important, yes. But sports journalism is a lot different from Spotlight. That isn’t to demean the profession. It’s just to point out that breaking stories about, say, a president authorizing his campaign to wiretap their opponent’s headquarters is different from racing against your buddies to be the first to correctly report the exact value of Bryce Harper’s contract.
It takes a special person to go into journalism. Someone willing to work long, hard hours at low wages compared to other pursuits. Presumably, people are drawn to it because of its societal importance. I’d imagine many feel—justifiably—that they’re doing something that matters. If Bill Dedman was self-righteous after The Color of Money (and I don’t know if he was or wasn’t), he’d earned it. But when some guy reporting who’s pitching Friday gets himself in a huff about a breach of that weird code of sports reporter etiquette, it’s annoying.
None of this is to say that sports journalists aren’t important. They work hard, and they report on something people absolutely love. Some issues they report on—domestic abuse, racism, poverty, etc.—are very important. Yes, a lot of them say remarkably dumb things from time to time (some much more than others), but that in itself can at least be entertaining. On the whole, the sports media industry makes sports better.
Still, sports reporters aren’t as important to the world as they are to themselves.
Example: Who, when playing a video game, looks at the press box?
So when one of them takes themselves too seriously, or just says something even more outrageously imbecilic than what Twitter has beaten our brains into accepting as the norm, and it hits at a time when our temper’s short because the bullpen just blew a lead right when we were talking ourselves into the possibility of hanging around the playoff race, it ignites fury.
This isn’t what happened to Callaway, of course. Well, the bullpen part is actually exactly what happened to Callaway, but the rest, as far as I know, was different. The point is that it’s a fair bet most sports fans have at least once wanted to do exactly what Mickey Callaway did yesterday: call a reporter a motherfucker.
Mickey Callaway will probably be fired soon. Not because of this incident, necessarily, but just because that’s what happens when you manage the Mets. And when he does, he can cuss at sports reporters all he wants.
When that day comes, though, he, like the rest of us, will be doing it at a screen.
