Baseball and Social Justice

"I think its okay to not know, but I think its wrong to deny the possibility of knowing." ~ On Objectivity/whether Justice or "Truth" can exist.

Another Barry Bonds post, reminder: 2001-2004 Bonds put up like 50 WAR and that should give you a hard-on as a baseball fan no matter who you are.

This was written as a response to the fantastic Joe Posnanski article about Babe Ruth which had a dumb sounding comment printed thusly:

"“I wonder if the middle-aged millennials will reclaim their era and turn Bonds and the rest the Selig-era crew into heroes.” — I think this is halfway happened already. When they go into the Hall, which I think will happen in about 4 months, the process will be complete. The reporting will probably say that Bonds’ election is an act of Social Justice. "

And my response was as follows:

"Greetings and salutations illustrious Invitro. So you’re tugging at something that is vaguely intelligent but doing it in such a way that makes you look utterly foolish; but hear me out this isn’t aimed at you as a particular blight or anything. There is a theoretical extant “Social Justice” in all humanity and there are groups that are wronged, except that the vast majority of pursuits in this vein are at least somewhat monetarily motivated bullshit; also the correlation with “Wronged” has more to do with who has money/lives in a first world country and who doesn’t than anything else. My personal viewpoint is simple “All men are equal under the sun except for the unique gifts God has granted them,” Napoleon Bonaparte (who employed African Marshals in the early 1800s); I feel like this is virtually indisputable as written. However the communal sense of justice as it is driven by stupid people by and large fails to see the overarching point and must accomplish some small thing with their task instead of attacking the larger establishment in some way that might actually change things.

To Bonds and Baseball: Bonds unquestionably suffered racism from being African American, but it probably has only a small amount to do with his lack of acceptance in the baseball culture; that’s easy enough to chalk up to image/”Well-Likedness.” Now if Bonds pushed that angle hardcore for the next several years it would probably work quite well getting into the HoF; but he’s only kind of mildly doing that right now; if he does push it harder than you have a point. But ultimately the only fucking thing that matters is whether Bonds was one of the best players of all time. Yes he was. Boom HoF. That’s it. This isn’t a debatable player like Palmeiro; Bonds is better than fucking everyone in baseball right now including Mike Trout, he was better than practically everyone that came before him; Bonds and Clemens are top 5 players all time. It makes no fucking difference how big of a douchebag they are, whether they’re black or white, how much they cheated, how much they abused women (which I’d guess about 50% of HoFers have done to one degree or another); these are the best of the best and that’s the end of the story (and everyone likes stories where the characters have flaws anyway)."

This is a very advanced societal fixing sort of concept and one that most people will fail to grasp because a lack of perception of macro elements, and it's probably not articulated particularly well here, but I always like to push the good ideas given the opportunity. So thanks to Invitro, he of the Joe Pos comments spam.