I said in the recaps this morning that I think the tone of mourning that has surrounded Buster Posey’s injury is a bit much. But in my mind it’s preferable to this, from the AZ Snakepit blog:
There is a lot of ground between the extremes of sappy “we’re all Giants fans today"-style blather and “fist bumps” over a guy’s leg being bent like a piece of licorice. Like say, the intellectual acknowledgment that, yes, the Giants’ competitive position took a hit on Wednesday night and a raised eyebrow of optimism at, say, the Diamonbacks’ or Rockies’ chances. Which happens to be true and does not require any value-judgment about a person’s injury.
I think the difference between those two things is not so much about being a good person or being a bad person as much as it is having some sort of distance between one’s emotions and one’s rooting interest. Which is to say, I don’t think this writer or anyone else who goes the “fist bumps” route is doing so because they’re evil. Rather, they’re simply doing so because they’re way too invested in their baseball team to allow for basic decency to enter into the equation to trump the tribalism on display in the linked piece.
There’s nothing less appealing in sports fans than when they fail to realize that there’s a life outside of who they root for. Don’t be that guy, OK?
