Bradford William Davis: Baseball let unity stand in the way of protest

NEW YORK — Baseball’s return from a pandemic immediately proved the limits of choreographed unity.

While wearing jerseys stitched with one of two patches — “BLM” or “United for Change” — covering Black Lives Matter tees, each team lined up alongside the baselines carrying a long, black cloth symbolizing their support. Morgan Freeman’s soothing voice recited a pacifying speech from Phillies veteran Andrew McCutchen that extolled “a new canvas of optimism,” and players were given a choice to stand or kneel or raise a fist, wear one patch or both (or none at all, as the Rockies did), so long as, by the time cameras rolled, everyone was united in carrying the cloth.

The league spread the cloth further by making it a socially-distant placeholder for players linking arms, a promotion of the league’s commitment to staying woke and safe, and a symbol of the protocols instilled to prevent future outbreaks, like the one that shut down at least four teams by Monday. “Technically, we weren’t supposed to be able to touch each other,” said McCutchen, who helped design the demonstration. The cloth was his “substitution.”

Call it a protest at an arm’s length. More than fine, McCutchen’s tweak was a better visual for everything that followed.

On Thursday, the Yankees and Nationals started the first game of the year by kneeling during the sanctioned ceremony, then jolting upward in unison for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

After the Yankees game, several Giants players and coaches, including former World Series hero Pablo Sandoval kneeled; on the Dodgers’ end, Mookie Betts was united on the ground by himself.

Then on Saturday, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks quietly knelt in the Nationals Park left field, in sync with the motion Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid made famous with the 49ers. (Bruce Maxwell adopted Kap’s protest with the A’s in 2017, and for that, he was drummed out of baseball for nearly two years.)

The Yankees outfielders claim they had a robust discussion with their team about their decision and gained their full backing, but without those knees bent alongside them, their action conveyed nothing short of breaking rank.

One Yankee, DJ LeMahieu, decided to scrape his hand across Stanton and Hicks’ backs while their knees scraped the ground. “It was just my way of showing that I’m with them,” explained DJ LeMahieu as he rationalized why he wasn’t literally with them.

“I know a lot goes into their decision.” LeMahieu didn’t delve any further into what went into his.

If you’ve read this far, it ain’t hard to tell where I stand (or sit, or kneel) on this past week. Kneeling during the anthem may be losing its sting, without it they might as well be Tebowing. Without moral conviction about protecting the safety of its workers and fans, or absent that, shame, no amount of black ribbon will stop the spread of a viral contagion — the Marlins held the same rope. Unity is only valued by the league as an abstraction in service of public relations, making it worthless. I don’t paint from a canvas of optimism.

But as a Black man destined to be picked last in every pickup game — and rightfully so — I have not walked a mile in the cleats of a Black athlete, and I’ll never intimately know the dynamics of a locker room beyond what these men choose to share. And Black athletes like McCutchen, Stanton and Hicks — the Yankees center fielder said LeMahieu’s pat “means everything” — affirmed their teammates and their support, even if most were offered from a distance.

When listening to Stanton and Hicks recall the weight of state-sanctioned violence, one I also bear, I want more for them because I want more for all of us. And for that same reason, I want more from them.

In Martin Luther King’s seminal Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King revealed his disappointment with “the white moderate,” who he argued was a bigger obstacle to racial justice than the Ku Klux Klan. King slammed those who preferred a “negative peace, which is the absence of tension.” Another word for the absence of tension: unity. King challenged those who patted him on the back by mailing letters of support to his jail cell saying, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”

What would King say to Black athletes who praise their teammates even when they won’t join them in action? How would he respond to those who provide a mediated, moderated alternative for allies that weren’t ready to march? We’ll never know for sure — King was killed over 50 years ago — but I believe his answer would reveal why one letter was written from a jail cell and the other was boomed from a jumbotron.

Like baseball’s health protocols and that stupid rag, the players’ demonstration was stretched too thin. On the same day Stanton shared that Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD until his life hung by a thread on the same freeway exit he took home from school, Cubs slugger Kyle Schwarber warmed up in a BLM tee and Chicago Police Department cap — somehow attempting to support teenaged police violence victims and the institution that covered it up. How is it possible that both Stanton and Schwarber could hold the same symbolic rope as a show of unity instead of a tug of war?

Unity takes on a different meaning when it’s negotiated with a league that, by the simple act of dismissing the severity of a coronavirus outbreak, conveys a sentiment that no one’s life matters. (After all, what unity is there to be had with Rob Manfred on anything?) Without maintaining a spirit of dissent, the demonstration functioned as a performance that was, as King once wrote, “devoted to ‘order.’” That’s not the “first step,” as Aaron Judge claimed on opening night — it’s just the first act.

Fortunately, there was a better example over the weekend worth following, but you’ll need to flip the channel.

As the national anthem played before the Seattle Storm and New York Liberty’s WNBA opener, neither team stood, knelt, or even rubbed shoulders. Rather than risk their protest becoming too associated with their league’s product, those women simply walked out. That’s another kind of unity.

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