Over the last several years, simultaneously praised and paralyzed by its entrenched traditions, baseball has launched multiple attempts at reinvention, striving to liberate itself from its unwritten codes of retaliation, its apparent hostility toward joy, and its expectation that every generation of players across all backgrounds must approach the game with the solemnity of a Dust Bowl farmer.
The sport has even attempted to reshape these customs through an industry-wide slogan: Let the Kids Play. Yet amid deep social divisions against the aggressive backdrop of Trumpism, the outcome has been a racial collision rooted in generational and cultural tensions that long predate contemporary politics by a century.
On Saturday night, Atlanta Braves star Ronald Acuña Jr. launched a third-inning home run against Zack Wheeler of the Philadelphia Phillies and glided around the bases with arms outstretched, mimicking an airplane and Euro-stepping past third base as though he were Manu Ginóbili. His celebration infuriated Wheeler and Phillies manager Don Mattingly, who viewed it as a violation of the game’s time-honored customs.
A week earlier, during what became a 16-1 rout, New York Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm stole two inconsequential bases against the Boston Red Sox in a lopsided victory after the defense had conceded his position. According to a century-old custom, runners are expected to respect such courtesies by refraining from advancing. Chisholm’s breach of protocol prompted Red Sox radio announcer Will Flemming to suggest on air that a Yankees player should retaliate by drilling one of Chisholm’s teammates.
Completing the trifecta, during a Colorado-St. Louis series this weekend, neither the Cardinals nor the Rockies took issue with each other, but umpire Doug Eddings did, halting the game to instruct Cardinals rookie Hancel Rincon to adjust his cap. Eddings determined that the rookie’s hat was excessively crooked, despite later acknowledging that Rincon had not violated any official rules. Rincon refused to disrespect his game on his field. Eddings then issued a time violation to the Cardinals when manager Oli Marmol protested, subsequently ejected Marmol, and afterward missed an obvious call at the plate against St. Louis.
In each of these incidents, the offended parties—Eddings, Wheeler (and to a lesser extent Mattingly), and Flemming—were white, while the alleged transgressors—Acuña, Chisholm, Rincon, and Marmol—were Black or Latino. Throughout this season, baseball has repeatedly found itself entangled in divisive culture wars, beginning with the World Baseball Classic earlier this year, when the American team soured the tournament through grim, militaristic seriousness while the rest of the world celebrated the joy of competition. Perhaps conflict is all America knows how to offer these days.
In June, when participation was voluntary, several players chose to assert their religious convictions by disrupting Pride Night, inscribing Bible passages on their caps. When league officials addressed the incident, the Department of Justice threatened to investigate whether baseball was discriminating against Christians.
Yet if baseball has indeed become an extension of MAGA ideology—and there is strong evidence to support this—what Eddings and others have revived is not precisely Trumpism itself, but what Trumpism implicitly demands: the relentless imposition of whiteness onto American institutions, and an aggression that emboldens gatekeepers like Eddings to remind players of color of their subordinate position.
No major professional league clings to its historical whiteness as fiercely as Major League Baseball. That whiteness is often labeled “tradition,” or playing the game the right way. This tradition is upheld by players of all backgrounds who were raised within the old-school American baseball ethos, steeped in its ethnic, Depression-era seriousness. Other sports adapt to the evolving generations of players who enter their ranks. The NBA’s Nikola Jokić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are not expected to emulate George Mikan or John Havlicek. In baseball, however, Bob Gibson and Pedro Martínez are proudly considered the spiritual descendants of Rube Waddell and Walter Johnson.
Mattingly expressed displeasure with Acuña, though his postgame remarks suggested his frustrations were not racial or racist in nature, but rather stemmed from witnessing a version of baseball becoming unrecognizable to him—a spectacle of bat flips and perceived unprofessionalism disguised as entertainment. Mattingly has spent nearly fifty years in professional baseball. He was once a teammate of the legendary showman Rickey Henderson, whose on-field theatrics were widely disliked, yet Mattingly understood Henderson was no buffoon. He also managed Yasiel Puig, a dynamic talent whose commitment to his craft occasionally wavered. Mattingly grasps the distinction between professionalism and its absence, between genuine joy and disrespect, and appeared to lament how these lines are increasingly blurred at the encouragement of those who govern the sport.
In more harmonious eras, when umpires did not appear to be seeking confrontation, and when baseball was not perceived as actively harassing players of color, Eddings might have been dismissed as another authoritarian umpire having an off day, venting his frustrations on a rookie making his major league debut and a manager who told him to “fucking grow up,” as Marmol did.
These are not such times. Eddings appeared petty and small, and baseball’s notion of “playing the right way” frequently serves as coded language for its perpetual conflicts with how Black and Latino players choose to express themselves—whether in competition, through their attire, their celebrations, or their emotions. Even in 2026, somewhere in baseball—as Flemming’s remarks demonstrate—it remains perpetually 1926. Flemming subsequently apologized to Rincon, though reports indicate the apology came only after pressure from the league.
The question must be asked: what is all of this truly about? It represents a stark illustration of how frayed the nation’s collective nerves have become, and what abuses of authority look like, particularly as baseball, operating within a MAGA-aligned country, increasingly resembles a hostile environment. The Cardinals responded by defending their player and collectively thumbing their noses at Eddings by tilting their caps as a unified gesture of protest. These small moments can provide the kind of spark that unites a team—after five months of mediocre performance, the Cardinals are striving to secure a late-season playoff berth.
As for Eddings, who later issued an apology, he came across as a doomed, strutting general surrounded by enemy forces. Umpires command little goodwill these days. The popular YouTube channel Jomboy, once a charming novelty for Yankees fans through its clever lip-reading of on-field altercations, achieved viral fame, and MLB, eager to capture a younger demographic, recognized that the telegraph would not be making a comeback and purchased an equity stake in the company. This transformed Jomboy from a clever fan site into an extension of MLB, which is now less innocently working to eliminate human umpires from the game. Beyond Jomboy, countless unofficial social media accounts have amplified umpires’ most egregious mistakes, intensifying the growing consensus that traditional umpiring must give way to technological advancement, much like the flannel uniform before it.
Eddings spent this Labor Day weekend inadvertently building another case for automated officiating, contributing simultaneously to baseball’s century-long culture war and to umpires’ accelerating self-inflicted irrelevance.
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Howard Bryant is the author of eleven books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He writes at Substack.