Mark DeRosa Is Not A Fan Of Bat Flipping, But Tim Anderson DGAF

Last night right before the Sox took the field Tim Anderson fired off this tweet.  It’s gotten to the point where he’s making a list and checking off names one by one Arya Stark style.  Marcus Stroman?  Fuck you.  Mark DeRosa?  Fuck you.  Brad Keller?  Fuck you

If you don’t like TA7 or anyone else getting fired up after dropping a fucking nuke, make better pitches.  It’s as simple as that.  But you also have to back it up on the field with consistently good play.  And TA7 has done just that.

1.3 fWAR, .375/.394/.615/1.009 slash with 6 bombs, 20 ribbies and 10/10 stolen bases.  His defense does need to be cleaned up a bit but he’s on a beeline to AL Play of the Month to start the season.  His play paired with Moncada’s, Abreu’s and Lopez/Giolito was insanely important for the White Sox this year.  Otherwise you could have gone and cunceled the rebuild if they all had dog shit years.

But TA7 has put a stranglehold on the White Sox as the face of the organization, and is slowly but surely doing the same with the rest of MLB.  But it’s not just his bat flips, it’s that he’s a confident, young man who is as great off the field as he is on it.  Just recently he took a large group of kids to watch 42 on Jackie Robinson Day

I mean, when’s the last time the White Sox have had any good press at all?  When they won the winter World Series and traded Chris Sale/Adam Eaton for a bunch of prospects?  Quintana for Eloy and Cease?

I honestly can’t even really remember.  They’ve become a forgotten franchise and the only time they’re in the news is when they fuck something up like the Machado bullshit.  The national media has largely forgotten them, baseball fans nationwide call them a loser franchise and Cubs fans laugh their tits off at the mere mention of the word “Sox”.

I mean ESPN doesn’t even recognize them as a Chicago organization.  It’s embarrassing yet I still kinda get it

Again, I almost get it.  That’s how irrelevant the White Sox have been to everyone but the truest diehard of White Sox fans over the last 10 years, and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.

But Tim Anderson say’s fuck all that.  Literally.  He’s leading the charge to re-writing the unwritten rules.  Baseball is a game that has been notoriously slow at evolving with the age of social media and technology.  He’s changing the stigma of the Chicago White Sox.

The White Sox do a great job of getting inner city kids to play baseball through their ACES (amateur city elite) and RBI (reviving baseball inner city) programs.  You think these kids don’t enjoy waking up to MLB Net or ESPN or firing up twitter and seeing Tim Anderson, a young, dashingly attractive black man dropping nukes every night for their South Side team?

For sure not.  These kids have posters, cards, jerseys, shersies and everything else Tim Anderson right now.  And it’s fucking awesome.  He resonates with millennials better than anyone on the team and maybe in Chicago.  The one player I’d say *maybe* does it a tick better is Javy Baez on the North Side.  Now Javy is one of the very best players in baseball at this point and Anderson still has work to do to get to that level on the field, at least over the course of more than just a month.  But that’s fine – TA7 works his ass off day in and day out to be the best player he can be and who knows, maybe this time next year we’re talking about how Chicago has two of the very best short stops in the league.

The White Sox have had a lot of studs over the last 15 years.  Abreu, Sale, Konerko, Thomas, Buerhle, etc.  But nobody is as close to as marketable as Tim Anderson is.  They have a goddamn gold mine on their hands from a marketing standpoint, and a great player and better person on/off the field.

So fuck your unwritten rules, Mark DeRosa.  Get with the times.  Baseball has a terrible problem with how they market their stars, and TA7 is changing that shit and changing it for the better.  Fuck all of your pitch clocks and pace of play rule changes.  Give me players who are energetic and enthusiastic about playing this awesome fucking game.  Not players who “play by the unwritten rules”.  Gimme new school and get the fuck rid of new school allllll day long.

Keep doing you TA7

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~fin~