“It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.” – Former Braves Pitcher John Rocker
As the inexorable march of time tightens its grip around the throats of our nation’s Boomers, middle age white males find themselves with few safe havens left from the woke fervor of the Tik Tok generation. Among those dwindling social sanctuaries is Major League Baseball — an organization which employs mostly young Dominican men, yet holds a special place in the hearts of the balding Caucasians who spent the 1990s reminding us to choke up on the bat, keep our eyes on the ball, and wait for our pitch. Now it appears that not even the national pastime can escape our nation’s reckoning on old white dudes.
It is amid this inquisition that Cubs broadcaster and former player Mark Grace finds himself behind in the count thanks to a seemingly innocuous story he told about his ex-wife.
Brockmire fans will remember the moment where the play by play man recalls catching his wife filling up his neighbor’s hindquarters with a big rubber strapon.
Did life imitate art? Did Grace use a live broadcast to expose his wife for engaging in deviant sexual behavior behind his back? No, even worse.
Did he call her a raging thundercunt for forcing him into a costly and drawn out divorce litigation? No, it was even worse than that.
Mark Grace called his ex-wife…I can hardly bring myself to think the word let a lone type it, but here goes…He called her a ‘dingbat’!
“It’s early afternoon and my ex-wife — I’m going to go Archie Bunker on you guys a little bit — I called her ‘the dingbat,’” he said in reference to the “All In The Family” character, who used to refer to his spouse as such.
“I said, ‘Honey, why don’t you drop me off at county stadium. … She decides a few hours later she’s going to come to the game a little bit early. … I’m getting ready for the game, I’m starting to get my game face on and all that song and dance. The business clubhouse guy comes running to my locker and he’s got this look of panic on his face. He’s like, ‘Grace, I just got a call. Did you park your car in Bud Selig’s parking space?’
“I thought, ‘oh my god, the dingbat parked in Bud’s spot.’”
Not since June 12, 1994 in Brentwood, California has a former professional athlete/broadcaster treated his ex-wife in such a disgusting manner. Thankfully this is the year 2020 and Grace was brought forth to atone for his slur.
“During today’s game I referred to my ex-wife in a way that I absolutely should not have,” he said in a statement following the broadcast of the Brewers-Cubs game. “I want everyone to know how very sorry I am about that. My remarks were offensive and inappropriate, and I deeply apologize.”
Sportswriters react to Mark Grace’s description of his ex-wife as a ‘dingbat’
Despite the mea culpa, Grace’s words were a little harsh for the Chicago Tribune, which reminded us that there’s no room for such talk, especially in the #MeToo era.
The #MeToo movement has been going on long enough for Grace to know what is and is not appropriate to say on the air, even if it’s still swirling around in his head. Some humor that might have worked during his former life as an Arizona Diamondbacks TV analyst no longer is acceptable…
Yes that’s right, the #MeToo movement has been invoked with regard to a man calling his ex-wife a dingbat while sharing a playful anecdote during a baseball game. Our national conversation is being guided by people who view the word ‘dingbat’ through the same moral lens as a woman being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby or forced to watch Harvey Weistein stroke his deformed dick into a potted plant just so to earn a paycheck. Chew on that like a mouthful of cool ranch sunflower seeds on a spring Saturday in 1997.
But the nerds weren’t done taking Grace to task even after he apologized, not by a long shot. The humorless ghouls over at Deadspin would not rest until they too had feasted on their pound of flesh, and reminded readers of comments Grace made in 2003.
“A slumpbuster is if a team’s in a slump, or if you personally are in a slump, you gotta find the fattest, gnarliest, grossest chick and you just gotta lay the wood to her. And when you do that, you’re just gonna have instant success. And it could also be called jumping on a grenade for the team.”
So here’s a man who thinks his ex-wife is a dingbat, a man who doesn’t mind banging a fat chick or two to break up a slump, a man who loves baseball. Am I describing Mark Grace? Yes. Am I also describing scores of men from across this great nation? You betcha! If you’ve ever spent a Saturday night with whiskey on your breath, watching your booze-limp erection struggle to split some wildebeast’s zit covered cheeks, then you are Mark Grace. If you’ve ever spent a Sunday afternoon drinking beer, eating all-beef Kosher franks, and arguing about Sabermetrics while your wife’s lawyers batter your savings account like a hanging curve, YOU are Mark Grace.
What the wokenistas over at Deadspin and the Tribune will never understand is that baseball at its core is a sport for average white dudes. Sure, the playing field may be filled with Cuban defectors and most bullpen rosters might read like an MS-13 indictment, but the ball park still stands as the last bastion of the pale skinned Boomer, and for men of a certain age, bitching about your ex-wife and bragging about banging fatties, are both well within the rules.
Say What You Will About The Royals, But Those Boys In KC Sure Can Handle The Lumber
Grace wasn’t the only one to run afoul of the woke mob. Reds announcer Thom Brenneman got the hook in the 5th inning after hot mic audio surfaced of him calling Kansas City “one of the fag capitals of the world.”
The requisite apology was hilariously interrupted by a home run, which Brenneman dutifully called.
Side note: For a sport often referred to as boring, in a season some have called useless, baseball is really delivering some top notch off the field entertainment this summer.
Brenneman was taken off the air following his apology, which I think we all understand and accept — it’s a corporate broadcast and this is 2020, ‘fag’ doesn’t really fly polite society anymore, I get it.
What I don’t get is a bunch of bloggers and twitter users getting their panties in a bunch over the comment and acting holier than thou as though they don’t use the word once a day in the group chat with their old high school buddies. (Actually, ‘fag’ is probably the mildest insult my friends and I trade with each other, the rest are too reprehensible to share publicly).
If you grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s — that last decade and a half before we all turned into huge pussies — then you know that ‘fag’ was the schoolyard insult of choice for older Millennials. If ‘fag’ as insult was ever meant as a slight to gay men it was only ever directed at a very specific type of gay man. The kind of gay man who won’t silence his giddy gossiping while everyone else is nursing a hangover at brunch, the kind of gay man who watches the Super Bowl for the commercials, and the halftime show, the kind of gay man that most gay dudes would probably call a fag.
In fact I would go so far as to say cock sucking and butt fucking are not what define a fag. Being a fag is about how you behave, not who you bang! Can a heterosexual cis-male be a fag? Of course, in fact it’s probably the ideal way to describe the entire cis-hetero male population of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Can a man suck a mile of big meaty dongs and not be a fag? This blogger says yes! Let’s go back to that Super Bowl party from before. Let’s say Dave blows his boyfriend Tom before the game, but shows up with a case of beer, and offers valuable insight on which personnel to use during the 2 minute drill. Is Dave gay? Perhaps, if he identifies as such. Is Dave a fag? No, he is not. Let’s say another guy, we’ll call him Joey, comes to the game regurgitating garbage from a New York Times article about how the NFL should be disbanded if they don’t do something about head injuries, while spending commercial breaks pointing out examples of every day sexism in Doritos ads. Is Joey a fag? Yes he is. That’s because ‘fag’ isn’t meant to diminish a man for loving another man, it’s meant to diminish a man for acting like a pussy.
Thus, when a blogger like Barstool’s Carribis get on a soapbox to declare the word ‘fag’ unacceptable, the only worthwhile recourse is to call him one too.