This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between. Please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the mailing list: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.)
For the next few weeks, as I figure out what kind of content to start paywalling, you can get a lifetime subscription discount of 20 percent off by clicking here, and you’ll get full access to the archives of over 100 essays and articles. (There will still be lots of free stuff, as well.)
I.
Every so often—probably more often than we’re willing to admit—the public perception of a major cultural figure suddenly implodes. The O.J. Simpson Bronco chase was the most radical example of this in my lifetime; Tiger Woods’ car accident in 2009 opened a Pandora’s Box into what became the most salacious one-eighty by a 21st-century athlete.
There was a time when we felt like we knew these people, even if we knew deep inside that we couldn’t possibly know them at all. We viewed O.J. as a genial and inoffensive television personality; we viewed Tiger as a single-minded prodigy who was too boring to deviate from social norms. They meant something to us, and then they came to mean something else, a phenomenon common enough that it feels like there should be an obscure German phrase to characterize it.
But what happens when the subject of this narrative shift is both remarkably famous … and yet completely devoid of any public meaning at all?
II.
What struck me most about the gambling scandal that implicated Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter was that pretty much everyone took a dim view as soon as the story broke. This couldn’t possibly be as simple as a multimillionaire being duped by a translator; Ohtani couldn’t possibly be that naive. Even Joe Posnanski, the most hopeful sportswriter in a business otherwise larded with cynicism, wrote that this is “either the public relations catastrophe of all time or an attempt to cover up something.”
Part of this skepticism was because of the very suspicious way the Ohtani affair unfolded; part of it is because we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to gambling and sports. But part of it, I think, is because Ohtani’s cultural presence is so completely strange: He may be the greatest baseball player since Babe Ruth, and yet I could not tell you a single thing about him beyond that, without resorting to Wikipedia. I do not know if he’s married or has children. I do not know where in Japan he grew up, or what his childhood was like. I do not know if he listens to K-pop or Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning,” or if he likes to heli-ski, or if he knows who the president of the United States is.
You can blame some of this on the language barrier. But you can also blame it on the marginalization of baseball as a national pastime; and you can blame it on the modern tendency, driven by social media, to cultivate a cautious public image that glosses the surface without actually revealing anything at all.
What it all adds up to is this: Shohei Ohtani is arguably the greatest athlete of the 21st century, and I literally know nothing about him. And so he seems like he could literally be capable of anything.
III.
“As America endured stock-market scandals, economic panics, race riots and ballot-box stuffing, as its boys were sent off to die on foreign fields, baseball came to be seen as the last bastion of fair play and decency,” wrote baseball historian John Thorn.
Thorn was referring to baseball’s greatest scandal: The 1919 Black Sox affair, which culminated in an entirely apocryphal story about the star player Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was reportedly confronted by a child when leaving a courthouse after delivering a confession about his involvement.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the child reportedly said, and even if it seems likely that no child ever said that, the quote became a symbol of American disillusionment, the way the CCNY basketball scandal would stun New York City three decades later.
IV.
Baseball, of course, was never a bastion of fair play and decency. It was subject to the same prejudices and temptations as America itself. But this is the life cycle of the American experience: We come to believe that something is pure, and then find we’ve been deceived in some essential way, and then we go ahead and do it again. In the most archetypal Great American Novel ever written, The Great Gatsby—about a revered figure who turns out to be a liar and a con artist—F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of a fictitious gambler named Meyer Wolfsheim, who (in the book’s narrative) fixed the 1919 World Series:
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
V.
It’s hard to be shocked by this Shohei Ohtani thing because none of us has any idea who he is. But I also think we’re not shocked because we’re not shocked by anything anymore. We’ve become so jaded as a society over the course of the past eight years—by the emptiness of politics and social media, by the hollowness of pop culture itself, by the willingness of public figures to behave shamelessly in the face of shameful acts—that it’s hard to believe in much of anything anymore. In the Gatsby cycle of hope and cynicism, we are near rock-bottom.
However this scandal turns out, it is what will come to define Shohei Ohtani for years to come: He is either deceiving us, playing with our last remaining shred of faith, or he is the last truly naive human being on earth. And given where we are as a society right now, we tend to believe the worst.
This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Reply directly to this newsletter, contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and share it with others or consider a paid subscription.
I know zilch about this Shohei fella, but I'd like to think that he prefers Ride the Lightening over Master of Puppets.