Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
This is a baseball column and we’ll get to our favorite sport in a second, but first, the NFL provided me with some good material this past weekend.
First, we need to recognize that there’s been an “all-or-nothing” mentality that has permeated sports fandom and media these past several decades and it has long been a pet peeve of mine. I’ve discussed it before, like when people say a team “has never won anything” if it didn’t win the ultimate championship, be it the World Series, Super Bowl, etc. Such a phrase is used as a pejorative, to the point that the suggestion is any player or coach or team that hasn’t won the big championship is a colossal failure. Winning games or even divisions or even conferences/leagues is shoved aside as nothing — a failure, even. These people would say the 2025 Blue Jays were failures. What a joke.
What goes hand-in-hand with that thought process, then, is the suggestion that every single game not carrying playoff implications is “meaningless.”
For example, Philip Rivers’ return to the NFL these last few weeks was not only a desperation move by the Colts, but also turned into a feel-good story, given his five-year hiatus and his age. The Colts, of course, have lost all three of his starts and were eliminated from playoff contention before Sunday’s game, rendering it “meaningless.” I loved Rivers’ quotes afterward, via The Athletic:
“Those games we played in the backyard, and we were 10 years old, (they) weren’t meaningless, right?” he asked rhetorically. “Nobody gave a riff about those. But you went home crying, or you went home happy, you know? So, there’s no such thing …
“Everything we do matters.”
Man, that last line. I love that so much. He’s spot on.
It made me think back to when Joe Burrow had healed enough to be medically cleared to play and there were shouts from all over the place that he shouldn’t waste his time coming back, given the Bengals’ uphill climb. Why would he bother to play when they can’t make the playoffs, they cried.
Um, because he’s making tens of millions of dollars a year to play football? How about that? It’s his job. He’s paid to play. Credit to Burrow for wanting to play and continuing to play.
Why are so many people so eager to call for players to just stop playing? It’s infuriating.
It all goes back to this all-or-nothing mindset. There’s no reason to even bother playing a game unless it leads to a championship. What a terrible way of thinking about professional sports.
This is an entertainment business built on fans loving and caring about the sport. We learn to love and care at a young age. Think about all the kids who might get to attend one game per year or even just love seeing certain players on a screen at home. That’s how leagues sustain themselves decades into the future. Demanding players stop playing can hurt in building future fan bases. Don’t even get me started on this load management nonsense from the NBA.
Players are paid to play the game. They are paid handsomely because they are so talented and, thus, entertaining to watch. That’s why we keep coming back. I’m incredibly pro-player in labor and salary situations, but that doesn’t mean I think they should rest whenever some people think they should. They are the talent and the product and the paying public deserves to watch the talented product. To believe that all the best players should be shut down due to being eliminated from playoff contention goes against the fabric of professional sports.
We hear plenty of this every single year in baseball. It drives me crazy. Let’s picture a superstar player in September with his team being eliminated. Basically, just picture most of Mike Trout‘s career (sorry!). Someone might say, “what reason is there for Trout to keep playing?” I’m glad this faux person has asked. Let’s run down the reasons.
- Professional pride. This is easy. Pro sports are a competition. Just because your team has been eliminated from the playoffs doesn’t mean you should drop the professionalism and try less hard. Play your butt off every time you step between those lines.
- Competition. Every September, there are a good number of games between teams fighting to make the playoffs/for positioning within the playoffs versus teams that have been eliminated. Every team fighting for playoff position deserves the opponents of the teams they are fighting in the standings to play just as hard in September as they did in April and May. This is a league-wide competition. You don’t lay down for an opponent.
- Individual stats matter for every player. Even if a player is signed to a long-term deal that can’t be voided, he still owes the game his very best every time out. Ultimately, this is a league that is supposed to be built on merit. Those kids making MLB debuts in September deserve the chance to prove they belong against the best. Pre-arbitration players are still building seasonal stat lines that will help determine future salaries. Players heading toward free agency are in a similar boat. This is a competition both on a team level and on an individual level. Meritocracies demand the best competition.
- It’s for the fans. The simplest way to put this came from an old Joe DiMaggio quote. When asked something along the lines of why he plays so hard every single game, even in games that don’t seem to “matter,” he is quoted as saying, “because there might have been somebody in the stands today who’d never seen my play before and might never see me again.” That’s exactly right. Again, think about some kids who might be attending their first Major League Baseball game. I’m picturing a game late in the season between two teams already eliminated from playoff contention, meaning demand for tickets is low and the prices might work out for families who can’t afford a game in the middle of the summer between two contenders. These people are owed the best product just as much as anyone else.
Now, since I used a DiMaggio quote, please don’t mistake this for one of those misguided “players today just aren’t the way they used to be” takes. There are plenty of players with that mindset nowadays. Julio Rodriguez in 2023 said, “It’s always 100%. You want people to know who you really are. And I feel like you’ve got to show that every time on the field. I want people to know me for who I am and not, ‘Oh he might be having a bad day or look he’s lazy today.’ No, I try hard. I want to keep that consistent.”
Look at games played by Marcus Semien in 2019, 2021-24. Check out Pete Alonso on an annual basis. We could keep going. So many of the players want to be out there every single day.
And yet, you get pushback to “rest” guys or sit them because some have decided that games not impacting who makes the playoffs don’t matter.
They matter. Like Rivers said, everything here matters. If there are injury issues, sure, sit out and get healthy. But if a player is medically cleared to play, a full season is owed to the fans who pay the player salaries in indirect fashion. Every game matters in pro sports.
