This week, a massive controversy erupted, when Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic wrote an article that focused on a sensitive subject and appeared to treat it insensitively. Where did he go wrong? By not just filing the idea away.
Image courtesy of © Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
By Friday, even Rosenthal himself admitted that he had erred in the choices he made when building the article that ran earlier in the week. To summarize (lest you missed it), the piece argued that the heinous crimes that seem likely to lead to prison time and the obliteration of an MLB career for the Rays' Wander Franco were an especially egregious example of the risks teams assume by signing players to massive contracts at very young ages. He got massive blowback for that, both because of the nature of those crimes (Franco is accused of sexually abusing a teenage girl and bribing both the girl and her family for their silence) and because of the perspective from which he seemed to write.
That backlash was justified. While Rosenthal's position in the industry and role at his place of employment requires him to write from a vicarious front office point of view at times, the human empathy filter always needs to be interleaved with any other layer of analysis we apply to anything. That's the remit of readers and of writers, and belonging to the latter fraternity doesn't absolve one of the responsibilities that fall on both groups. Rosenthal is only human, himself, and it's fine that he was unable to turn off the part of his brain that is trained to see big stories from the angle of an executive making some theoretical future decision. The great dual mistake was that he elected to let that thought out, and that his editorial team then allowed that thought-turned-column to see the light of day.
Somewhere beneath the firestorm lies a perfectly fine point. In suggesting that people barely out of their teens are risky propositions for nine-figure investments, he was only updating a frequent refrain of none other than Branch Rickey. The notion comes off as paternalistic, self-serving, callous, or some combination of the three, almost no matter when you say it, but saying it about a player who was involved in something so unforgivable and aberrant felt especially so.
We ought never to turn off our critical thinking centers, and it's fine for highly visible moments like the Franco situation to serve as occasions for the kinds of closer reflection we too often neglect between crises. Rosenthal needed to pause longer and think harder about the impact it would have on readers, on victims of sexual abuse and pedophilia, and on the baseball community, though, before externalizing those reflections.
My favorite novel is The Witch Elm, by Tana French. Like any good literature, it's not about any one thing, but rather, it works in layers and levels. Fittingly, perhaps, it centers quite a bit on the seemingly innocent but often lethally dangerous failures of young people to see beyond their own experience or past the thin masks put up by the others near them. For my money, though, the most important theme it advances is even simpler: We don't really know each other. We barely know ourselves, and then, we only know the fragile versions of ourselves that our life experience has created. We're so ignorant, we often fail even to notice the fragility of the aspects of ourselves we consider essential.
That's something close to what Rosenthal wanted to communicate, I think. He might not want to say this, but it's pretty clear (not just from this instance, but from past writings and comments he's made) that he's uneasy with the massive wealth (and the inextricable power that comes with that wealth) given so freely to players who have barely reached adulthood. I share that unease, on a level deeper than any tangible risks I could articulate. It's a reasonable position. It might even be a noble one, and stating it aloud is worthwhile, sometimes.
Timing is everything, though. Talking about such risks is hard in the wake of a thing like what Franco did. Choosing to talk about it specifically through the lens of what Franco did was a glaring and easily avoidable error of judgment. Rosenthal faced a dilemma familiar to any columnist who has ever wanted to make a point. If you don't attach a specific case or example to an argument, it will often be either dismissed or wasted, because people will fail to connect with it or fully understand it. He wanted to make what he probably believes (in an earnest, human way; Rosenthal is not an unfeeling guy) to be a worthwhile point.
However, examples and news pegs have to be well-chosen. This one wasn't. It is sometimes the maddening, deflating duty of a good columnist to risk that vagueness or ineffectuality, in order to preserve their humanity and serve their readers and their community better. You might have to write some variation on a column a handful of times over a handful of years, in order to slowly bring more people around to the idea that the point you're making matters and that the side you're taking is the side of the angels. That's not ideal, but it's better than accidentally making smaller something so huge and ugly that it should never be thus downplayed.
We don't really know each other. I certainly don't know Rosenthal. When I read his article this week, and when he made his appearance Friday on a web show to make amends for it, I was reminded of that in forceful terms. I refuse to impute any real malice to his choices in this case, but it seems to me that he needed to keep the lesson closer to the center of his own mind when he sat down to write. The fundamental conclusion we should draw from the premise that we don't know each other is that we need to proceed with greater empathy. We're all moving in the dark, so we should take care not to step on each other. Sometimes, that means putting an article idea in a tickler file for later.
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