Why MLB's Attempt to Curb Hazing Is Misguided

You may find this hard to believe, but getting dressed up like a woman during my rookie season in the big leagues was one of the best experiences I've ever had in my playing career. Hell, I'll bet if you polled the hundreds of grown men who've experienced something similar as part of their big league hazing experience, they'd say the same.

Getting hazed was and is awesome because it marks the fact players have made it to the big leagues, the place we'd all been trying to get to since we were kids; a dreamland where you fly private jets, stay in five-star hotels, and play a kid's game for ludicrous sums of money. In fact, calling it "hazing" is a bit misleading because no one is physically harmed, and no one is forced to do anything. No player would risk injuring another player who helps his team win. If the price of admission to stay in the majors were always dressing like a princess, a nurse, a cheerleader, or Hillary goddamn Clinton, we'd have rocked a closet full of tiaras, push-up bras, and white power suits.

Former teammate and all around good dude Vernon Wells recently tweeted that baseball has gone soft in banning female costumes during hazings. I'm not sure it's gone soft as much as it's gone political, and not even effectively so.

If the minds that govern baseball want to make an actual difference, why not demand Cleveland Indians owners Paul and Larry Dolan bury the most offensive caricature in modern sports instead of policing what costumes veterans make rookies wear? Why not ask if parading eye-pleasing women at stadiums to do little more than clap in rhythm, dance, and fling T-shirts into the stands from atop dugout roofs isn't worse than one day of grown men dressing up? Why not ask why there has never been a female GM?

Sadly, there are no female major league players who could speak about their experiences regarding this ritual. If there were, these players would mention that this was less about making fun of certain genders or gender roles, but more about getting players out of their comfort zones.

Right now, baseball feels overtly masculine because it is overtly masculine. It's overtly masculine on hazing day, and on every other day. In overtly masculine environments, men will do things to rob each other of their masculine capital—like putting rookies into feminine outfits.

"Alright, kid, you think you're the greatest thing ever now that you're in the bigs, huh? We'll see how you feel after a day wearing this mini-skirt."

Many players won't see these new rules as a way of cultivating understanding. There will be a backlash. They will ask, "Why must I conform to a voice in the crowd or a comment on the internet? You are only offended now that I've given you access, so why don't I simply stop giving you access and go back to business as usual?"

You may stop players from this hazing ritual, which may make the sport feel more accessible to fans, but the truth is, it's no more or less accessible than it was before. It's not going to be more accessible until women break down the gender barrier and carve out a place for themselves in the sport. I know MLB wants a world where Kylie Bunbury and Mark-Paul Gosselaar (stars of the Fox series Pitch) might actually be a rookie-veteran pitching battery, but if Ginny Baker were an actual big leaguer, the vets would haze her by making her dress up as well, probably as Larry the Cable Guy, a sumo wrestler, or Vanilla Ice.

Ironically, I don't even get the sense that this policy was meant to appease women—that was just a by-product. I got the sense that it was to appease a few players who disliked hazing day. To that extent, MLB may have gone soft.

Let me tell you how hazings actually work. The first time I dressed as a woman was as a September call-up with the San Diego Padres. We were playing the Rockies in Colorado in our last series of the year. After a loss, my fellow rookies ambled into the clubhouse and found our lockers stripped clean. Our street clothes had been removed and replaced with Hooters outfits. That is to say, a girl's tank top with the Hooters logo printed across the front and a pair of impossibly short neon orange Daisy Dukes.

No one protested. In fact, if anything, it was the most upbeat and positive the locker room had ever been after a loss—there were 99 that season. Music came on, beers were passed around, and laughter flowed as we all tried to solve the riddle of how to stuff that much sausage into a small bag.

Next, we marched across the street from Coors Field to a bar, where my fellow rookies and I had to do shots—two shots per player, a fraction of what many rookies voluntarily drank on the flight afterwards—with Brian Giles and Trevor Hoffman. At the time, I'd just started drinking. I had my first alcoholic beverage the year before, when my team won the AA championship. I hadn't been drinking until then because my brother was a recovering alcoholic. His sobriety coincided with our championship party. Many of my current Padres teammates knew my teetotaling background and offered to do my shots for me. But I wanted to do it because it was part of an experience I'd been waiting to have my entire career.

If you want to say this bar room blitz was offensive, it was—for the poor bystanders that had to see a pack of un-manscaped dudes picking orange tights out of their cracks. But people weren't horrified. Most were intrigued. Some of the women at the bar offered to stuff dollars into our orange tights. Some of the men offered to buy us more shots, out of sympathy. Almost everyone wanted pictures with us—after all, it's not every day you see members of a Major League Baseball team waltz into a bar, let alone dressed like Hooters girls.

After the bar, we boarded our team bus, went to our private team jet, and flew across the country to the Ritz Carlton to check into our private suites. Was it embarrassing and uncomfortable? A little bit. But people weren't laughing at us as much as they were laughing with us. And if they were laughing at us, who gives a shit? The experience was fun, and funny. More to the point, as ridiculous as it was, most of the men in the bar would have probably traded places with us. It was our right of passage.

Just playing in the majors isn't all that matters in the grand scheme of things. You are part of something, and that something isn't grounded in the same rules that govern the outside world. That is, in large part, where baseball's unwritten rules come from. It's an elite fraternity with its own values. Not all of them make sense to the outside. I'm a little dumbfounded that some younger players are complaining that a little booze and a costume makes the workplace hostile or embarrassing.

I didn't feel bullied the two times I got dressed up, and I've written more critically about baseball player-on-player bullshit than any former player/analyst I know. Bullying at the major league level is when an older player threatens to kill you for writing about them, or choke-slamming you for not running out a ball. Bullying is not buying you drinks and putting you in a costume for a league-wide traditional day of comeuppance, when ten other rookies are doing it with you.

And, guess what? Even before the new rules, players always had the right to opt out. You may be looked down upon, you may suffer some social scorn, but you're a grown-ass man! No one can make you do anything you don't want to do.

I know full well that I speak from the vantage point of a privileged white male, which affords me no right to judge when someone is offended. I've never had to struggle against gender or racial inequality. I can only offer my personal experience as a guide.

I understand that baseball wants to be more inclusive, but legislating behavior in this manner says that players and locker rooms can't tell the difference between play and serious sexual harassment. Moreover, it also says that the people outside can't tell the difference either. It brands the hazing acts as purely sexually debasing, which the vast majority of us never felt. It also sets the stage for these hazings to go back into the dark, away from the scrutinizing public eye—a force that did keep things toned down, even though the current opinion may think otherwise.

I admit that, in this world of Brexits and Trump presidencies, I could very well be missing some widely accepted truths. But I'd also like to suggest that we may be making this a bigger issue than it ever actually was.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter