It is crazy how fast the online community can come up with an idea and mass produce it. Last week during a Detroit batting practice, for Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, ESPN blogger Buster Olney witnessed the following events transpire:
Within 4 days a Tiger's blogger, Walkoff Woodward , has already begun mass producing the t-shirts (pictured above).When Cabrera took his turns in the box, he carved long liners to right field, over and over, shouting to the others to guess whether they would clear the fence.
“SI OR NO?” Cabrera yelled. “SI OR NO? SI OR NO?”
When the ball would land on the other side of the chain-link fence, Cabrera punctuated the drive this way: “SI, M———–.”
What will the side effects of Cabrera's new "catch phrase" be?
Well to begin with, it adds a whole new chapter to the mythology surrounding Miguel. Fans will now have a different image of Cabrera due to a fun conversation at a batting practice. As we have discussed in class, fans want to view baseball players as pure beings. It turns out pure beings usually dont spout out Motherf$#@%! when they hit the ball over the fence.
This does a few things to Cabrera's image, first it labels him as more of a bad boy. This is potentially something fans can latch onto, they could see this devious speech as a projection of Cabrera's life as a whole. This mirrors the main concept Barthes discusses in Mythologies, that myths are created by the confusion between history and nature. Just because Cabrera was using profound language at one instance in history, it does not mean that he is a "devious" person in nature.
However due to the enormous amount of myth present in baseball this new catch phrase could forever change the image of Miguel Cabrera, for better or for worse; only time will tell.
I feel like more and more, baseball is evolving into a sport about individual "rockstars" who don't care about having an angelic reputation. In this sense, Cabrera inadvertently started a public relations ball rolling that will most likely help his career in the future. As we learned in Moneyball, GM's look for players with charisma, who can put fans in seats. Cabrera's catch phrase certainly won't hurt his popularity, and in dollar-driven industry like baseball, popularity is key to a long career.
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