You’ve got to be kidding me.
The graphic blunder occurred just prior to an eighth inning commercial break during the Yankees’ Saturday night 14-1 surge past Boston on the network’s “Baseball Night in America” broadcast.
Though a Fox Sports spokesman e-mailed USA TODAY Sports on Sunday, July 17, stating “during last night’s telecast, we used poor judgment on the use of a graphic” and that they “sincerely apologize,” the damage is already done. What has happened to us as a Nation, as a sports-loving community, and as members of a shared digital space that someone could have considered this an uncontroversial decision to make?
Obviously, Fox Sports is an accredited outlet—the last thing they will do, because it’s wholly unnecessary, is throw an employee under the bus. Jack McGuire of Barstool Sports theorized on Twitter, “some graphics editor not from tristate got assigned post inning transitions. They found an overhead drone shot and did what they did. Didn’t think. You wouldn’t know the meaning of that place if you weren’t from here…” But that’s giving a pass to someone who knew the significance of the location enough to know it would garner a reaction. Now, how they didn’t have the foresight to anticipate what kind of response it would draw, is beyond us at The Messenger Sports.
Was 9/11 not an Earth-shattering event? Everyone, whether they lived through it on the ground here, experienced it on TVs from afar, or were born afterward, knows what the date “September 11, 2001” means; what images of the Twin Towers – or of where they once stood – mean. Before they were brought down in heinous execution by the extremist terrorist organization Al-Qaeda on that fateful Tuesday morning, the World Trade Center’s flagship buildings epitomized the American Way. When they were removed, patriotism became unification, and unification became healing, until their physical absence carried said messaging above the ruins and on through to–the intense present. 2022 is a time of such socio-political division that a neutral-by-comparison sector like sports media can fail to remember the ramifications of their actions, no matter how well-intended they were, on the grandest stage.
Really, it’s an asinine image to process, the seconds worth of Yankee and Red Sox logos in place of the World Trade Center memorial pools, which were both unveiled on September 11, 2011 to mark ten years to the date of the attacks. It is optically misguided even more so when you account for the community of 9/11 survivors – those who lost loved ones in the attacks, and were forced to mourn a collective departed that’s last moments were globally televised from similar vantage points.
We’ve said “Never Forget” time and time again, slapped it as stickers on the backs of our civics, shared it as hashtags on our social media pages, tattooed it on ourselves. But there’s still people out there who simply don’t get it, and that’s unfortunate. Either way, we implore you to change your heart if it somehow wasn’t changed already that day, or when you were old enough to learn a great deal about that terrible day, to step up and say, I’ll forget entertaining an ounce of 9/11-pertaining “trutherism,” at least for today. Forget ever contemplating how taking away funds from those belonging to first-responding everyday hero enterprises – namely, firefighters, policemen and healthcare workers – can be effectualized. Forget complaining that the whole world’s out to get you and the walls are always closing in on you, when there are people a bit older who lived to tell the tale, and have more than a thought or two to spare on what it’s truly like to have not four walls, but every wall, engulfed in a black billow of airborne smoke, chasing after you, everyone you know and everyone you don’t, in broad daylight.
Forget all of this, and remember one thing: everything. That way, sacred recreation grounds like the ball fields America’s pastime are played on can have more of Chicago Cubs great Sammy Sosa, a Dominican Republic native, iconically sprinting the Wrigley Field warning track with a miniature American Flag when the sport returned a week after the attack. More athletes like Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Madison Bumgartner, who just this past Fourth of July came out draped in a full-scale flag. And less avoidable instances like Saturday night’s.
Game presenters in general must do a better job of not letting the darkness in lest it’s absolutely necessary. Especially with the modern pressure of a migration to streaming – where, on the technical side, the freshest faced and fiercest trained all flock to en masse. For something as questionable as Saturday night’s fiasco just may have been the thing to make an older demographic that still consumes entire ball games head to sleep an inning earlier than they originally would have.
You’ve heard it before– baseball argued as a metaphor for life. The ups and downs, the friendships you form and vendettas you forge, the unpredictability of when it all will end. But, ultimately, it’s supposed to bring about the combination of objective fun times and competitive wartime in ways that reject the real world’s horrors outside the lines in favor of whatever call the umpire just blew within them. Or, in this case, the editing bay graphics op whose slip-up turned everyone into an Internet cop. Including me.
It was just seconds, but if the tragic day in discussion taught us anything, it’s that everything can change in a matter of seconds. Therefore, do not waste a moment. Hold your national networks accountable and remind them, per your aptness for playing live event critic from the confines of your living room, that they don’t hold a directorial candle to your beloved regional network’s coverage. And that this declaration is utterly devoid of bias, because it can’t be biased if it’s true across the switchboard.
No one wants to change the channel, so don’t give the viewer a reason to. That is the Message. This is The Messenger.
