A Barstool Baseball Deal
Sometimes the dots don’t connect right away. Often times, it takes returning to a topic to fully understand what was going on and the possible implications of an incident. In this case, the incident I am referring to is a brawl that took place on July 15th. The location of the brawl was Yogi Berra Stadium and the setting was a Frontier League baseball game. The actors at play were the visiting Sussex County Miners, the home team New Jersey Jackals, and the fans. Oh, and something I missed the first time around, Barstool Sports was also there.
I’ll preface this by saying that there has been no real fallout from the brawl nor has there been any evidence that shows Barstool Sports as an entity was directly involved with the brawl. What has been sussed out however is that on the night in question Yogi Berra Stadium was full of Stoolies, as Barstool Sports fans like to refer to themselves. Some were likely at the game because they are both Stoolies and Jackals fans, but as is often the case in the independent baseball world, a good chunk of the fans that night were there for the promotions taking place. On this particular night, there were two promotions being offered by the Jackals. The first was $1 Beer Night and the second was a hot dog eating contest judged by Barstool Sports personality, Frank the Tank.
Combine an endless stream of booze with an entity that has a track record of fans engaging in an aggressive fashion both online and offline and well, this is what you get. Reports have it that throughout the night fans along the first base dugout were especially vicious towards visiting Miners players. They unfurled obscenities, insults, and the like at the Miners. From all reports, the Miners talked back some, but they handled it in the fashion most professional ballplayers handle razzing from fans: They stood there and took the abuse.
Late in the ballgame, sometime around the fifth or sixth inning, things took a turn for the worse. No longer satisfied with a war of words, fans began to throw beer at and pour beer into the Minders dugout. It’s at this point that video footage shows both Miners and Jackals players rushing into the crowd to fight with the fans. The actual fight lasted only a few minutes and wasn’t much of a fight in actuality. Still, the incident was documented through the aforementioned video footage, some of which was captured by another Barstool personality, TJ Hitchings.
The hot dog eating contest took place on the other side of the stadium, so it would be fairly easy to dismiss Barstool’s role in the incident. That’s where reputation and precedent come into play. As an organization, Barstool has a reputation that has been well earned. They have no problem harassing women, urging their fans to cause trouble for people they don’t like, and so on and so forth. The Jackals created their own mess by having a crowd full of Stoolies on $1 beer night. It’s been lucky for them that the incident came and went with only a brief flash of fanfare. Heck, Barstool used the incident to draft a post to their website and proudly plastered the incident all over social media. Barstool clearly benefited from fans pouring beer on players and the players going into the stands to fight those very same fans.
Why does this matter now? In the past couple of weeks, rumors have started to swirl that Major League Baseball and Barstool Sports are working on a deal to stream MLB games on Barstool’s media platform. Officially, Barstool is one of a few companies bidding to stream MLB games in 2022. Unofficially, it is being reported that Barstool is the front runner based on Rob Manfred’s neverending desire to connect with new fans. I’ve been so fed up with MLB for a while now that this news was quickly registered as “yep, that sounds about right, but so what?” until I listened to a podcast describing the Yogi Berra Stadium incident and for the first time I heard about the incidents association with Barstool Sports.
MLB regularly engages in scummy business practices. Whether it’s the manipulation of young players’ service time or teams now having in-stadium sportsbooks, MLB is by no means a clean and pure organization. That being said, they remain the largest and most influential baseball organization in the world. Knowing where their priorities lay doesn’t change that fact. MLB is held to a higher standard than the Frontier League (although the Frontier League is an MLB Partner League so they are also a reflection of MLB) and with that higher standard comes a certain level of accountability.
It’s clear from the proposed Barstool partnership that MLB doesn’t care about accountability. That’s not a shocker or revelatory in any way. It still needs to be pointed out. If MLB won’t hold themselves accountable, then outside forces (fans?) need to step in and fill that role. MLB sees no issue in partnering with Barstool and they appear to see no problem with incidents like what took place at Yogi Berra Stadium. As long as the Barstool deal brings in new fans and lines the owner’s pockets with more money then everyone who matters at MLB will be a happy camper. MLB as an enterprise has never really been a good steward for the game of baseball. Under Rob Manfred, that futility has been accelerating. Entering into a partnership with Barstool is just one more sign of how woefully inept the current regime continues to be in that role.
-Bill Thompson
