On Aug. 2 last year, Trea Turner went 0-for-5 and misplayed an 11th inning grounder that cost the Phillies a late-night victory. He showed up after the game to answer reporters’ questions, penitent and miserable, and then he reportedly went back into the batting cages to try to work himself out of his struggles. The first year of his 11-year contract with the Phillies was, to that point, the worst season of his career.
A local radio host named Jack Fritz proposed that Phillies fans give Turner a supportive standing ovation the next time he batted at home. Other sports radio shows and Phillies communities debated the plan’s merits. Fritz: "Of course, people are gonna ridicule it. ‘Be like, aw, what's that gonna do? Blah blah blah.’ Let me just say this: It can't hurt! And what if it does work?”
It worked. The ovation was unambiguous, rising in waves as Turner’s teammates joined in, and repeated in all of his at-bats that day. The shortstop, hitting .235 at the time, went on a 10-game hitting streak and batted .337 for the rest of the season, he bought space on billboards to thank the fans, he helped lead the Phillies to the NLCS, etc.
Unsurprisingly, this plot would get recycled. Last week, when Anthony Rendon was sitting hitless at the top of the Angels’ batting order, in the already miserable fifth season of his seven-year contract, some fans on a group chat1 decided to try to replicate it. An official-looking campaign to give Rendon a similar ovation during his first at-bat Friday night got a lot of traction on social media, got some national mockery from other teams’ fans, got written up in the Los Angeles Times, and got discussed during the Angels’ broadcast. But Rendon is not Trea Turner. It’s not clear he is physically capable of turning things around. It’s not clear that the Angels’ fans actually have any goodwill left for him. I went to the game to see what would happen, because it felt, in the moment, like a last chance.
**
The Angels fans were chirpy Friday night. During the traditional pre-game highlight video—which displays great achievements and figures from club history—they booed every time the erstwhile Angel Shohei Ohtani appeared on the screen, then booed even louder when owner Arte Moreno did. (The next day, Sam Blum reported in the Athletic, Moreno had been removed from the highlights clip.)
Any hopes that Rendon would get a Trea Turner feel-good ovation diminished before the game had even begun. In pre-game ceremonies, when each Angel was announced, Rendon was lightly booed jogging out of the dugout. Before the first pitch, when the Angels’ defense was read out by the PA announcer, booed again.
The top of the first went quickly, and—absent any walk-up music—Rendon was announced as the leadoff hitter in the bottom of the first. On the TV broadcast, play-by-play announcer Wayne Randazzo acknowledged some boos but, he said, “about 75 percent of the crowd here was giving him a standing O.” “Yeah, it was cool to see that,” the color analyst Mark Gubicza added.
“Cool to see” and “75 percent” is not close to how I experienced it. Out of around 300 fans in my outfield section, I counted 10 or so standing up when Rendon came to the plate.
Here’s how it looked on the broadcast:
There’s a cluster of standers over his left shoulder, but otherwise not much. If you zoom in, there seem to be about 50 people standing, out of maybe 500 people visible in that still. It’s sparse.
Boos tend to sound louder and more distinctive than an equal number of cheers, but the proportion around me sounded overwhelmingly ooooooooo-ey. A few vindictive fans behind me, wearing Angels jerseys, actually cheered each strike in the at-bat, and several fans around me cheered when Rendon struck out. The crowd was considerably louder for his strikeout than it had been for his walk-up. One fan who had spent the previous days evangelizing for the ovation posted a reaction GIF on ex-Twitter: “I’m getting cooked.”
**
When ballplayers began to collectively bargain for the right to change teams or negotiate salaries, mostly beginning in the 1970s, owners resisted any true free market. The players association executive director Marvin Miller told players, “the owners are out to control themselves through you.” That is to say, in a truly free market the owners didn’t trust themselves (or each other) to save any dollars for yachts. So they, the owners, had to create a system that automatically constrained their spending. They negotiated all sorts of mechanisms, like draft pick compensation, service time requirements before free agency, international bonus pools, luxury taxes, and so on, to limit the freedom of the market.
The result of this was that it led fans to gamify owners’ financial decisions. A player was never just a player, but a contract, and a contract wasn’t just a contract but a commodity within a metagame of complicated rules. This made certain aspects of team-building intriguing, but it often made the whole system kind of un-fun. It constantly put the focus on how much a player cost, so that you’d end up hating roughly half the players on your team for not being as cheap as somebody only a little bit worse. It meant that seemingly every great player would reach a point in his career when his fans kind of wished he’d go away.
We used to talk a lot about “bad” contracts. That formulation is out of fashion now, because most writers don’t want to sympathize with billionaire owners’ complaints about labor. And it really is more accurate to think about these deals as relationships in which, as soon as the ink is dry, each party adopts the other party’s interests as their own. The player wants to play well and for the team to do well, the team wants to do well and for the player to do well. And the risk, for both parties, is that they’ll be trapped. There’s uncertainty in all of this, but at the end of the day the team and the player are in it together.
The fans, as the third stakeholder, are, too.
So when the Phillies fans stood up for Trea Turner last year, what they were really doing was reassuring Turner that they saw the contract not just from the team owner’s perspective—is Turner overpaid????—but also from Turner’s perspective. They didn’t want him to be unhappy. They didn’t want him to feel trapped in a city that didn’t love him, or a situation in which he couldn’t thrive. It was important to them that this be a good contract for him.
To the small degree that they could, they were taking responsibility for what they could affect. The fans, helpless to do anything except try to cheer Turner back to greatness, at the very least did that.
**
There’s a model for an aging player on a losing Angels team who saddens nearly everybody with his decline but doesn’t ever looked trapped.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Pebble Hunting to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.