Why Is Sports Twitter So Irate?

Why are baseball fans mad rather than happy about Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh battling heroically for the A.L. Most Valuable Player award?

Sports Twitter seems to have gotten dumber and angrier over the years.

It used to be mostly positive: “Wow, look at this great play!”

But now it tends to be more negative in affect.

For example, baseball’s American League has enjoyed a great competition for Most Valuable Player this year between the gigantic New York Yankee slugging outfielder Aaron Judge (at 6’7” and 282 pounds, he’s probably the biggest man to ever regularly play the field) and the Seattle Mariner’s catcher Cal Raleigh, who has hit 60 homers this season, 12 more than anybody else ever to play that physically debilitating position.

If Raleigh hits three homers in his last 3 games this weekend for 63, that would break Judge’s American League home run record of 62.

To my mind, the American League homer mark is perhaps the most prestigious in American sports. Its progress since 1918 has been Babe Ruth 29 in 1919, Ruth 54 in 1920, Ruth 59 in 1921, Ruth 60 in 1927, Roger Maris 61 in ‘61, and Aaron Judge 62 in 2022.

What other American sports records are equally distinguished? The National League homer mark of 73 is an exercise in trolling by Barry Bonds, who, not unreasonably, got sore after the 1998 season in which Mark McGwire hit 70 and Sammy Sosa 65 to the delight of media and fans, despite both players clearly juicing on steroids. Bonds felt, with good reason, that he was the greatest player in baseball, so he resolved to finally start using PEDs and show everybody what the best player could do if he cheated like his lesser rivals were cheating.

There’s Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in an NBA game, but that was accomplished during a silly season, 1961-62, when players were instructed to run up the score and not play defense.

There’s Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, which is famous because DiMaggio’s other statistics aren’t as spectacular as his rival Ted Williams’. For example, DiMaggio batted .408 during those 56 games, which is really good, but Williams batted .406 for that entire 1941 season, which is great. Still, DiMaggio was a great player and deserves to own a record. By luck, he happened to snag this fairly random record.

Other impressive records, like Tom Brady’s 89,214 yards passing in his career have too many digits in them to become famous. Brady’s 7 Super Bowl wins is a great mark, but it almost seems like too few digits.

But that hasn’t stopped tons of X users from posting “The MVP race is OVER — it’s obviously Judge!” or “The MVP race is OVER — it’s obviously Raleigh.”

Why the urge to shut down argument, one of the more enjoyable aspects of being a sports fan?

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