The Art of Competition

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The Black Mamba Joins Twitter

Kobe Bryant, the prolific NBA scorer and long time social media critic has now blown the floodgates open. Kobe has joined Twitter.

After spending most of his career critical of players who embraced social media, he has now blossomed into somewhat of a digital darling. It all started during the Olympics when he joined Facebook and shared insights and moments from inside the Olympic village. His presence on Facebook was well-received. He raked in thousands of likes and started to gain millions of followers.

I’m guessing he decided to join since his rival to the NBA spotlight, LeBron James has been putting up huge social media numbers the past few years. I’m sure Kobe’s competitive instincts kicked in and he suddenly wanted to dominate another statistical arena.

Kobe (or Kobe’s people) is great at social media. Everything feels like it is coming from Kobe’s voice. He gets a little preachy sometimes talking about greatness and being competitive, but that is exactly what I expect he actually sounds like. LeBron’s social media voice is good too. He comes off as a joker who loves basketball. That is true to his image. A lot of athletes, particularly European football stars seem to have their agents or managers at the helm of their accounts. They seem very PR driven and come across as mainly marketing and not giving people deeper access to these stars.

It’s a great trend when the best players in a sport genuinely take to social media. Sure they have their marketing alterior motives of wanting their shoes to sell. But if they are being genuine with their voice and using social media to give fans more access, everyone wins.

Welcome to cyberspace Kobe. Great to have you.

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WHAT THE HALL OF FAME MEANS TO ME AS A BASEBALL PLAYER

The baseball Hall of Fame is not a church.

It’s not a courtroom. It’s not a laboratory. 

The Hall of Fame is a locker room.

I don’t care how the players got there. I just want to know they were the most dominant to ever play the game. I want that locker room to be populated with the ideal pool of talent from which I could create the best 25 man roster of immortals to take into a singular impromptu game for a share of even greater immortality in the forgotten cornfields of Iowa.

The Hall of Fame is the greatest baseball club of all time.

For this club to remain great, it needs to count every single baseball legend on its roster.

No asterisks. No fine print. No exceptions.

The character clause needs to go. If the gatekeepers of baseball allowed a player to play the game, and if the game profited from their play and fame, they need to be compensated with eligibility to the Hall of Fame.

I call ‘character clause’ on the institution of modern baseball that has sucked the ticket sales, magazine sales, TV and merchandise deals that are generated by sluggers like Barry Bonds belting record setting numbers of home runs; who would now turn a cold shoulder of judgment to appease the overly judgmental jury of media and public opinion.

If you let them play, you need to let them in.

Are known racists already in the Hall exempt from this hollow character clause? What about ball scuffers and bat corkers? A surface level character clause smears mud on the only lens a baseball hall of greatness should view its subjects through. Could a given candidate truthfully be considered one of the greatest baseball talents of all time?

If you post rationalize why an all time talent should be excluded from the hall of greatness based on a character flaw or an embarrassing asterisk, the hall loses credibility in its ability to define generational, historic talent. With a litany of fine print, the all of Fame becomes merely the marketing tool of a self-righteous band of gatekeepers trying to define a narrow image of what a baseball player is.

As for the performance enhancing substance issue, my take is this: Steroids don’t win games. Immensely talented baseball players win game. If you give a stranger on the street a dose of magic juice, they will not suddenly be able to compete at Ruthian levels of dominance on the major league field. There are no cheat codes to becoming a great baseball player. There are no ‘talent enhancing’ substances.

The Hall, as an idea, demands the most talented players to ever pick up a ball and bat. It needs to be the immortal lineup of historical players that new comers to the game must measure their own greatness against.

As a baseball player, I need the Hall of Fame to be the undeniable best collection of baseball talent. I need it to have the top players that the coming generations will need to top in order to be considered great.

Moral judgments will be sorted out in Life’s extra innings.

That’s where the racists, the liars, the cheats, the scuffers, the ne’re do wellers can plead their cases.

I only want the Hall of Fame to make baseball judgments. I want them to examine a player’s skill and the impact and contributions their talent at baseball made.

If a player defined a decade with his talent, that player needs to be in the Hall of Fame.

Be he hero or villain.

Another Commissioner will make that call.

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