Saturday night I watched a grown man in eye black climb out of a major league dugout carrying what I am told is a foam sword, hold it over his head for the cameras, and then hand it to a teammate who pretended to knight him. This was the postseason. This was on the network. Coach DiMaggio is somewhere in a cemetery in Wilkes-Barre rotating fast enough to power a small city.
I have been keeping a list since Wednesday. By my count we are now up to six. The Phillies have the sword. The Dodgers have a feathered boa they put on whoever drives in the go-ahead run. Somebody on the Tigers is wearing a wrestling belt. The Brewers, when they had a pulse, were doing something with a rubber chicken that I refuse to investigate further. There’s a team passing around a viking helmet, and I’m pretty sure I saw a kid hold up a stuffed duck that lights up.
A stuffed duck. That lights up. In October. In a baseball game.
My buddy Ray Kowalczyk called me at the seventh-inning stretch, which is when Ray calls about anything important, and asked if I’d seen the sword. Ray is 71 and watches every pitch on a tube television he refuses to replace because he says HD makes the pitchers look tired. He said, and I am quoting him, “Duke, when did the dugout become a Build-A-Bear.” I told him I didn’t know but I was working on it.
Here is what I have figured out. Somewhere around 2019 a marketing intern at one of these clubs noticed that highlight clips of guys hugging in helmets weren’t getting enough engagement. So they introduced a prop. The prop generated content. The content generated merch. The merch generated a second prop, because the first prop was now stale. And now we are at the part of the cycle where a 27-year-old shortstop making nine million dollars a year has to remember to grab the boa before he climbs the dugout steps or his agent gets a phone call.
Coach DiMaggio’s celebration, when somebody hit a home run in 1974, was to nod once. If it was a big home run, he nodded twice. If it was a grand slam to win a sectional, he might say “attaboy” loud enough for the second baseman to hear. There was no chain. There was no helmet. There was certainly no sword. The reward for hitting a baseball over a fence was that you had hit a baseball over a fence, which was apparently considered enough at the time.
I’m not saying you can’t have fun. I watched Petey Corrigan, who played a couple of years of A-ball in the Pirates system before his knee went, celebrate a walk-off in 1981 by sliding on his stomach across an entire infield in his home whites. He had grass stains up to his collar. His mother made him sleep on a towel for a week. That was a celebration. It was free, it ruined a uniform, and nobody had to remember to bring a prop down from the clubhouse.
The thing that gets me — and I’ll admit I’m working myself up here, Denise has already given me the look from the kitchen — is that none of these props are about the game. They’re about the camera. The sword exists because somebody at the network can cut to it and the chyron can say SWORD GUY in 80-point font. The boa exists so the postgame interview has a visual. We’re not watching baseball anymore. We’re watching baseball produce its own marketing reel in real time, and the players are good sports about it because the alternative is being the guy who didn’t want to wear the duck.
You want to know what the worst part is. My grandson, who is nine and a sweet kid, asked me on FaceTime last night if our high school team had a prop. I said no. He said maybe we should get one. I said over my dead body. He said okay Grandpa and went back to his iPad.
Denise is bringing chili. She says she heard about the recipe on a podcast, which is its own column for another day.