Last year, Major League Baseball instituted a slew of new rules that were largely intended to have a single effect: to speed up the game and make it more watchable for fans.
Despite some early wariness from players about things like pitch clocks and the predictable moaning of baseball traditionalists, who’ve always measured their openness to change in geologic time, the updates were eventually celebrated as a near-universal success story. Action in the form of runs scored and stolen bases went up, even as the average time of a nine-inning game went way down — sliced by nearly 25 minutes from the previous season.
Additional rule tweaks are in store for the 2024 season, as M.L.B. hopes to chart an even brighter and more boredom-free future. But if baseball truly wants to up the drama of its games and win back the hearts, minds and eyeballs of fans who’ve been abandoning America’s pastime in favor of other sports, perhaps it needs to look to the past. Which is to say: It’s time to bring back bench jockeying.
In its early days, in the mid-19th century, baseball was seen as a genteel sport, defined by guidelines of ethical behavior that were agreed upon by gentlemen’s clubs. All that changed in the 1880s, when a ballplayer named Arlie Latham started making a whole lot of noise. As a player, Latham peaked in the 1887 season, in which he batted .316, stole 129 bases and scored 163 runs. But his biggest contributions can’t be captured with statistics: Latham’s legacy was built on his pestering antics — a voluble and ruthless brand of psychological gamesmanship that laid waste to the sport’s gentlemanly mores.
In those days, ballplayers served as base coaches, and Latham in that role was unrelenting in his efforts to antagonize and disconcert the other team. He’d yell, insult and heckle; he’d try to interrupt a pitcher’s concentration by running up and down the baseline — a tactic that was widely frowned upon and led to the adoption of the designated coach’s box. Newspapers noted his “insane whooping,” “incessant howling” and “disgusting mouthings,” but Latham’s team kept winning. Before long, other teams started howling, too.
Thus emerged the great baseball tradition known as bench jockeying — the practice of showering one’s opponents with verbal abuse in an attempt to disrupt their focus or otherwise screw up their on-field performance. The legendary baseball scribe J. Roy Stockton once called it “probably the greatest cruelty in the American sports picture.” Today, we’d just call it trash talk.
For decades, bench jockeys — also known as “holler guys” — were a standard feature of professional baseball. The best and most effective bench jockeys, who may have owed their success to a fierce wit, a piercing voice or a penchant for creative slurs, could even cling to a roster spot after their actual baseball skills had so degraded that they were as useful to a team as an empty tin of chewing tobacco.
Bench jockeying took many forms. Satchel Paige, the legendary pitcher, would do his talking from the mound. Paige named his pitches — the bat dodger, the trouble ball, the midnight creeper — and psyched out hitters by telling them exactly which one he planned to throw or by calling in his fielders, confident in his ability to strike out the side. “I’m gonna throw a pea at yo’ knee,” he’d yell toward the batter’s box. Meanwhile, as a manager, John McGraw, who was said to have “a genius for making enemies,” would go so far as to hire private detectives to dig up dirt on opponents, which served as distracting grist to be bellowed at critical moments in a game.
At the most basic level, talking trash raises the stakes of a competitive confrontation. It puts more on the line — like pride and possible humiliation — and that makes the outcome of the contest matter more than it otherwise would. It puts more pressure on the performances of all involved, both the talker and the target, and demands to know whether they can handle that added stress and expectation.
It’s not just athletes who become more invested by such bluster and abuse, though. We all do. That’s why trash talk is such a reliable tool for marketers in the sports world and beyond. When professional wrestlers cut smack-talking promos on one another, that makes fans care more about the outcome of the match and draws them into the arena. Trash talk is the secret sauce behind the viral success of Wendy’s social-media accounts, and it’s the foundation for basically all reality television and talking-heads debate shows. It gets us to tune in, to not click away.
In baseball, bench jockeying started to fade from the picture sometime in the mid-20th century. Among other factors, the advent of a players’ union and free agency cultivated a feeling of more fraternity among those in uniform. Athletes also imagined themselves as having more to lose as game checks ballooned in size: No one wanted a retaliatory fastball aimed at his head. (Throughout the bench-jockeying era, violence was not uncommon as a response to verbal abuse.) But without trash talk, baseball has lost more than the occasional dugout brawl and well-timed zinger; it’s lost some of its drama.
For all the success of last year’s rule changes, how many more eyeballs might baseball draw if teams treated one another to a little more loudmouthed bravado, a little more bulletin-board material, before big playoff matchups? Teams and players could talk more trash to one another via social media ahead of a matchup, for one. But even within a game, trash talk could be carried on TV. Many players already wear broadcast microphones to capture the sounds and conversations of the game. There could also be more cameras and microphones embedded on the field itself, like the BaseCam. (In cricket, they have stump mics.)
How much more interesting would an encounter between former teammates like Max Scherzer and Bryce Harper be if the slugger came to the plate barking that Scherzer is too old to still be on the bump? Or if the ace informed Harper he’ll still be making him look silly when he’s 59, as Satchel Paige did with opposing hitters during his late-in-life return to the mound?
In my humble opinion, baseball has always been America’s greatest game. I applaud the willingness of the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, to brave the shrapnel by way of punditry last season and make significant changes in a tradition-obsessed sport, because we needed it. Badly. But now that baseball is once again watchable, it’s time to take a page from the past and make each moment on the ball field matter even more. Working together, major-league players can build the sport back up to its former glory and have it reclaim its pre-eminent place in the American imagination — so long as they’re also willing to occasionally tear one another down.
Rafi Kohan (@rafi_kohan) has written extensively on the business, culture and psychology of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.”
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