Some MLBers Think It's the End of the World They Can't Dress Rookies up Like Women

Really nice of the rookies to get up early this morning and get coffee for the vets. #StillBetterThanAAA #Mets pic.twitter.com/iODfwCC16K
— New York Mets (@Mets) October 1, 2016

Yesterday, Major League Baseball banned the "tradition" of gussying up rookies in women's clothes. Here is the best line in the New York Times article on MLB's reasoning:

"All out starting next season: Bryce Harper as a member of the United States Olympic women's gymnastics team, Mike Trout as Lady Gaga, Manny Machado in a ballet tutu and Carlos Correa as Wonder Woman."

You can probably guess where this new Anti-Hazing policy announcement is going, right? Somehow this has become a "controversy" because real jockmen are being denied the time-honored tradition of donning fake Jessica Rabbit boobs in parking garages. We'll let Aubrey Huff s-p-e-l-l it out for you:

How rediculous! The world has gotten 2 damn sensitive! This has been a time honored tradition. The world is full of sensitive snowflakes https://t.co/Zhadz1MXBf
— AUBREY HUFF (@aubrey_huff) December 13, 2016

What seems to be the issue is that players are being denied a vitally important bonding experience. Sports talking dumb-dumb Danny Kanell, who thinks concussions have a liberal bias, says it's "completely dumb" because "players love it" (except some, you know, actual players) and "what's next? Canceling Halloween!" Yes, Danny, the next major MLB initiative is to cancel the beloved children's holiday of Halloween.

Great line by @MrBrianKenny on new rule ridding MLB of hazing, "It's not the wussification of America, it's the de-jackassing of it." #MLB
— Norm Wamer (@normwamer) December 13, 2016

(The Worldwide Leader could use a de-jackassing, and we have an idea where to start.)

Angels pitcher Huston Street wrote an op-ed for the AP today in which, he too, fears for the end of Halloween….comedy, and kids playing dress-up…

He calls the ritual a "team building" exercise (what ever happened to bowling night?), a "rite of passage" (that Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and 99 percent of Cooperstown never partook in), and recalls the time he got decked out in his "Baby, One More Time" finery.

"Yes, I remember my dress-up day. I remember it fondly. I was dressed as a female of some sort. We weren't making fun of people that actually dress that way, we were dressed up in uncomfortable clothes, as a contrast of macho dudes dressed in too tight fitting or too revealing clothes for our body type. Anyone looking at the exercise from a lens of humor would see the contrast for what it is and wouldn't be offended."

A female of some sort. Who could possibly be offended by that?

Sportswriters Stacey May Fowles, Meghan Montemurro, Christina Kahrl, and Julie DiCaro for starters. The latter wrote a particularly impassioned piece last October when the Mets dressed like the women from A League of Their Own.

Seeing Mets dressing their rookies as the Peaches and Belles in order to humiliate and demean them, for such is the purpose of rookie hazing, was tough for me to take, and I wasn't alone.

'To trivialize the women who played hardball professionally through the 'stigma' of cross-dressing men privileged to do the same job is an insult to the history of the game as well as to women,' said ESPN baseball analyst Christina Kahrl, also one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus."

Huston Street goes on to argue that since men have been dressing in "humorous fashion for thousands of years," so why change now? As if humans can't evolve beyond gay panic jokes at Barry Zito's expense.

"Rookie Dress Up is like anything in this life. Done appropriately it is a healthy ritual. Taken too far and it becomes either offensive or dangerous. And now it's out of the players' hands. A part of the game that was openly and happily shared with fans in an effort to show our child-like spirit or humble ourselves in wearing something funny as a team-building moment is now gone but truthfully won't change much, and I don't really care that much."

See what you've done MLB, your political correctness has destroyed the child-like spirit of humble ballplayers who just want to dress funny—oh wait, the policy doesn't say that at all. Even if the dolling up rookies as women thing is done in good fun, and it does generally seem to be, then it stands to reason that dressing up as inanimate objects would fit the bill, no? Ridiculous outfits are totally permissible within the attempting-to-be-less-crass-and-shitty guidelines. Look, here's a human wearing an oversized novelty whoopie cushion getup. That's hilarious, right Huston? It brings teammates together through wearing dumb stuff and farting. Win-win.

Curiously, no current or former players seem to be whining about the new hazing clause that says players can't be coerced into drinking until they spew. The wussification of America continues unabated.