Anthony Rendon doesn't love his job
How angry should fans be about that?
Dear readers,
Major League Baseball’s Spring Training officially kicked off this week — praise be to the Baseball Gods — which means that, after four long, cold months of inactivity, the baseball media is circling the wagon for juicy scoops and buzzy gossip. This week, they sunk their teeth into Los Angeles Angels’ third baseman Anthony Rendon, who broke the cardinal rule of sports media: he said something interesting.
Let’s get to it.
-Calder and Ian
How much money do you have to earn before your job is no longer your “job”? Sure, most people would agree that folding t-shirts at the Gap for $10 an hour is a job, plain and simple. But what about, say, playing professional baseball for $35 million a year? Is that a job like any other, or is it something else entirely — a sort of sacred honor and duty?
This is, it turns out, a very touchy subject for baseball fans. On Monday, Los Angeles Angels third-baseman Anthony Rendon set off a media firestorm when he staked out one possible position in this debate: Baseball is a job. During a media appearance on the first day of Spring Training, Rendon — who has hinted that he’s considering retiring after this season — was asked by a reporter if baseball is “still a top priority” for him.
“It’s never been a top priority for me,” Rendon replied. “This is a job. I do this to make a living. My faith, my family come before this job. So if those things come before it, I’m leaving.”
“Is it a priority?” the reporter followed up.
“It’s a priority for sure,” said Rendon. “Because it’s my job. I’m here, aren’t I?”
If your job is something like “banker” or “journalist” or “bartender,” this is an entirely reasonable position to hold. But it apparently is not in the eyes of a significant number of baseball fans and reporters, who proceeded to pile onto Rendon as an ingrate and a “cancer.”
Some of the anger is understandable, especially from Angels fans. Since signing a seven-year, $245 million contract with L.A. in 2020, Rendon — who was one of the best players in baseball in 2018 and 2019 as a member of the Washington Nationals — has significantly underperformed expectations, posting abysmal numbers and failing to save the Angels from their generally downward trajectory. So, from the perspective of Angels’ fans, it’s easy to interpret Rendon’s latest comments as a tone-deaf justification for his recent subpar performance.
But the truth is that even at the height of his performance, Rendon has had a somewhat ambivalent relationship to baseball. In an interview with the Washington Post in 2017, Rendon — who is a devout Christian — pointed out that a lifetime of living out of Ritz Carlton hotels and having all your worldly needs attended to by other people is not great for your immortal soul — and has a tendency to turn baseball players into selfish divas. In 2018, he told the Post that although he “loved baseball” and “loved competing,” he didn’t love all the pageantry that came along with the game: “I’m not a fan of everyone treating you different because you play a sport,” he said at the time. “How am I different than anyone else? I’m a human being, and I have my faults, too.”
Many fans are convinced that it’s all about wanting it more. In the NBA in particular, there’s a whole cottage industry of podcasts talking about just how much Kobe Bryant pushed himself and his teammates to greatness. Kobe loved basketball, and his drive to win was so great that he did everything in his earthly power to become the best he could be, the narrative goes. And sure, Kobe probably maximized his potential (at the cost of all kinds of stuff off the court) in a way that Rendon has not. It’s a fair opinion to believe that if someone is being paid millions of dollars to compete, they should exercise every possible avenue to try hard.
What that whole concept obscures, though, is that professional athletes are all already 1. preternaturally talented and 2. preternaturally driven. Some people have more of the first, some more of the second. Rendon’s underperformance in recent years seems to have to do at least to some degree to a loss of drive to compete. But so be it — if he doesn’t want to do his job anymore, his performance will suffer and he’ll be driven out of the league or retire.
We get it: every baseball fan has to imagine that the players love the game as much as they do, and we all think that if we were blessed enough to be able to hit a baseball 400 feet — and get paid a ton of money to do so — we would shut up and hit those baseballs. But Rendon is voicing an important truth, even if he’s doing it for the wrong reasons: professional athletes are workers, even if they’re extremely lucky ones.
And there is a good principled reason to agree with him. Even if their material interests are very, very different, Rendon and the college athletes who are fighting to unionize are working against the same misperception — that athletes are somehow fundamentally different from other workers. Rendon may be an asshole for saying so, but hey — at least he’s our asshole.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . how the NCAA is obscuring the history of women’s sports? “The NCAA erased an entire generation of women’s sports” by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post (Feb. 24, 2024).
. . . an explanation into why baseball’s pitchers keep getting hurt? “A Pitcher’s View On The Tommy John 'Epidemic'” by John Wholestaff in Defector (Feb. 23, 2024).
. . . the crisis hanging over golf? “The Looming Specter of Golf Without Tiger Woods” by Alex Kirshner in Slate (Feb. 20, 2024).