A Baseball Story: Why All Heels on Deck is Ending

Since early 2018, a roster of incredible people have contributed outstanding baseball writing to the All Heels on Deck platform. Their work has been thoughtful, in-depth, at times fun, other times deeply serious and intimate. They've been paid, though not nearly enough, for presenting work that's uniquely they're own, and invaluable to the baseball community. There has also been illustrators and graphic designers who helped bring ideas to life. As a team, and as individuals, they deserved an audience. 

For the most part, they didn't get that well-deserved audience. 

The doors to All Heels on Deck will close next week. There are many reasons for that. But what my thoughts return to, the thought that makes my stomach knot, is that these amazing people didn't get read enough.

A few months ago, Sheryl Ring began writing her own column about the intersection of baseball and social issues. It was a dream project, very much in my personal wheelhouse, and certainly the kind of thing baseball readers want more of these days. In the aftermath of some of her writing for another publication, she was harassed so badly, she took a leave from writing and laid low. Her column, in it's early stages, would have to wait after just a few published pieces. That never quite developed. That was the beginning of the end in many ways. Not because of that, but at the same time she was facing a fallout, the sense that AHOD couldn't go on was creeping up on me. 

I announced the debut of a new baseball writing platform in December of 2017. The announcement was made after a short planning stage, but long after the idea has been in my mind. I'd been imagining creating a place that prioritized women, PoC and LGBTQ baseball writers for a long time. I also knew I wanted to pay them. I just didn't know how. So I worked out the details, and told some colleagues the idea for the name. Like Heels on The Field (my minor league baseball blog), it was fiercely feminist, independent, humorous and intended to challenge the sexist, patriarchal dominance of the sports industry. 

What no one in the business knew was that I'd had a baby. At the time I made the announcement, she was tiny and I was sleepless. During her multiple naps (hurray!) I worked on the website, the design, the plan for content, and contacted potential contributors. Every person I contacted was excited and wanted to be part of the debut, or at some point in the future. My own excitement was building. This was it. Motherhood and the most important thing I'd ever hope to contribute to the industry were happening at the same time. Ok, I was tired, nervous and completely new to both roles, but I got through that by focusing on what my heart told me, and digging in for strength I didn't know I had just as I had many times before. 

The response to the new, one of a kind site was met with a ton of support. I cherish the private messages I received from people I've respected for years. I'm especially grateful to the new connections I made with young women and members of the LGBTQ community who loved the platform, and many who wanted to know what they could do to contribute. 

But that positive response was a bit darkened, and quickly. A backlash, led by another woman in baseball media began almost immediately. I was riding high, but also ready to listen to helpful feedback. What could we create that was unique? How could we challenge the sexist garbage takes we'd read for years? What sorts of analysis, features and interviews were important to publish? What could I do to succeed at managing the business side, something I was ill-equipped to handle alone? I hoped for guidance, cameraderie and energetic debate. That is not what unfolded over the next couple of days. 

The attacking comments about the title that insisted I was creating something that was "dangerous" to women, and the petty mockery that was personal and cruel, and, honestly, typical of girls I went to school with who delighted on another girl's misery, weren't important enough to send me into hiding. I wasn't going to dismantle the project because of that kind of dialouge. I'd faced enough of that from men. The one that stayed with me the most was from Yankees fan and writer Amanda Rykoff. She didn't include my handle, but addressed my life and career, and what my set of beliefs are, without ever having a conversation with me.

Her tweet read: 

"Heels" is her brand- her blog, her Twitter hande, etc because she believes "heels"= feminine. It's always been problematic to me. I want to support this but I can't -- as conceptualized now."

In a few short sentences, she erased my years of work, based on a sexist idea that I'd mainly heard from men. Her perception of me was all that mattered, and, I realized, this was possibly true of other women in the industry. It wasn't the first time I'd been subjected to that kind of harmful erasure as a woman, both in the sports industry and in society, but it was so concise in delivery. So certain. I knew that no matter what I had done in my life and career, no matter how many women I'd helped in the industry, no matter how much sexual harrassment I'd faced in the clubhouse, the press box and from fans, despite many miles traveled and over a decade of nose to the the grind baseball writing,and writing about sexism in the industry, and, finally, creating a platform for undrepresented voices in baseball, I was not an acceptable woman and feminist.

Not only that, she was making an assumption, as men do, about the symbolism of "heels" as an indication of something about a woman. Never mind that the "brand" was one I'd built to give myself the confidence to do things I never imagined. I felt like a super hero or a character, someone that I'd hoped to be. A woman with no fear, a woman without a past of abuse, who could breeze past sexist bullshit. I can't tell you how far those "heels on the field" had been from the baseball world throughout my life. I'd overcome sexual abuse and assault, as well as relationship violence. I had pursued something no one believed in, and few encouraged. I was almost always alone in those minor league clubhouses and press boxes. In the major leagues, I felt like a child leaving middle school to transfer to the big scary high school. I felt small. The heels gave me a bit of magic power, like fairy dust sprinkled on my feminist brain, as I powered forward, dying to kick the shit out of the patriarachy. 

I was nothing, according to her. And what I was creating deserved no notice, no chance. I read lots of talk from a circle of women in baseball who echoed her attitude, and made clear that as a woman, that didn't mean I was above criticism. Gender criticism is important. I have said that many times. Feminism is an idea. And not everyone agrees on the idea or how to execute. So, no, that was not a problem for me. The questions were valid, and I tried to answer them as best I could without revealing everything I knew would be in the debut. I stayed level-headed for the most part. I seeked guidance from Christina Kahrl. I heeded her advice, trying to stay completely up and open. 

So when the debut arrived, I figured that once those women read the incredible first few stories that included a personal essay by a trans writer, and another personal essay by a fully veiled Muslim Cubs fan, they would then continue their thoughts. We would resume the discussion. Pehaps they'd ask some tough questions, and, hopefully, a lot of praise on the writers. Once they read the work, what did they think? But, as I learned, that was never their intention. They weren't there to have a discussion in good faith. They didn't want read the work of undrepresented voices in baseball more than they wanted to see me fail. As Rykoff pointed out, I was problematic. What I accomplished, and what all of those writers were doing to change the industry, didn't matter. What mattered was perception. What mattered was hating me for what kind of woman they believed I was. Like many men in my life, and in our lives, they just wanted to silence me. Sidenote, one of the women in the herd writes for a site that I love. It's called Bitch. I hate that word, and refrain from using it to describe women. But Bitch Media also explained why they chose that name on their site. I have pitched them and regularly read their work. They too were questioned about that name. If you don't have a problem with a site that uses a word that is historically derogatory towards women, you can't really have such a huge problem with the word "heels" in the title. It's not hard to connect those dots back to what I said earlier in this piece. It was personal and rooted in feelings about me as a woman in sports media.

AHOD went forward, and nothing stopped the train as we progressed down the tracks. New subscribers were coming in daily. The energy was there for a short time. As the months went on, I tried and I tried and I tried. I raised funds, I endlessly promoted the site, the writers, the importance of the idea, and the unique and meaningful fact that I was paying people per story.

I also moved back home to Philadelphia, continued caring for my baby and myself, battling a lot of dark moments, confusion, utter exhaustion and isolation, mixed with wanting to hold her, comfort her, watch her grow every moment. I was afraid to be too far from her. I was overwhelmed to not have a moment to breathe. I wasn't alone. But I was alone a lot. 

After awhile, the train kept stalling. As a new mom with minimal help, adusting to a new life, and working through PPD, while trying to build and balance a business, and be an editor, I just wasn't able to create the platform I hoped. I didn't get the funding. I didn't get the subscribers. I can't pay writers what they're worth. I can't manage all of it alone. I have tried to reconfigure this juggling act many times since AHOD's inception. I have to move forward, but hopefully not forever. I want to bring this back. Open these doors again. Maybe someone will partner with me in the future. Maybe someone has a new idea we can work on together, in order to give this platform a new lease. I hope so. 

When I look back at the body of work that people contributed, it looks more like we worked on a lengthy project, a kind of experiment, or maybe a book together, rather than a blog or website. We dreamed our dreams out loud. I connected with people who taught me a lot about how important these moments are. Non binary people who asked, "Do I need to identify as one or the other, or anything at all?" The answer was, of course, no. You are you. Please come in. Teach us, tell us a story, whether it's personal or statistical analysis or a mashup of all sorts of ideas. Throw paint at the wall. Write the wild thing you think no one wants to read. Analyze a trade or a team in a way that other sites might not allow or find interesting. Bring your pain, your joy, your absurd thoughts, your silliness, your creativity, bring all of you. AHOD was home if you wanted to be there.

I don't want to say I failed. I just wish I could have made this last. I have to do what I've always done in my career and throughout my life. Take a moment, reasses, breathe, and ask for guidance. See where the next idea is.

And, ok, I won't say I failed, but I am sorry. Women, PoC and LGBTQ baseball writers need to be heard, and the industry must seek to include them without apology, without qualifying by saying, "Hey, we just want the best person for the job." Nope. Not going to work. Sports editors must be deliberate in changing the industry. They must put the idea of equality into action. Not with specialized programs or quota filling. Make diversity hiring a priority. Period.

AHOD will be live for a bit longer, with final wrap-up coming. And Patreon subscribers wil continue to receive content for awhile. They're separate, and I'll be addressing them that way.

This idea is now yours. What can you do with it? Where can you take it? How can you make this successful? How will you have impact? What can you create that will shift the balance, inspire and connect? Please do it. Don't hesitate. 

I leave you with the words of a poet Goddess from country outer space:

"You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, so you might as well do what you want." Kacey Musgraves

Thank you readers, friends, colleagues, followers and subscribers. 

And fuck the patriarchy. 

Sheryl Ring: The Week From Hell

By Sheryl Ring

“Crusty tranny dyke.”

For some reason, of all that my wife and I endured during what we now call “The Week of Hell,” that’s what sticks in my memory the most. Three little words. “Crusty tranny dyke.”

How bad was it? I’ve dealt with hate before. You can’t be a woman – especially a trans woman – in any kind of even quasi-public setting without having some kind of vitriol thrown your way. But this was different. I’d been misgendered, mocked, harassed, called a “thing” and “that.” I’d even received anonymous threats before. But these – these were personal. I’m not repeating the threats here because I won’t give those people the public platform they so clearly crave. I won’t give them my platform, or whatever is left of it. But I will include a sampling of how social media responded to my story. It’s not, alas, all that much better.

It started inauspiciously enough. I spent months working on the Cubs’ coverage of Russell, talking to people in positions who would know what was going on. I’m eternally grateful that of all the people they could have confided in, they chose to talk to me. I told no one of our conversations, because that’s what they requested – and I agreed. Eventually, one of the sources let me know that they would be willing to go on the record, at least anonymously. It’s an enormous responsibility to be entrusted with telling someone’s story, especially when that story involves issues as weighted as domestic abuse and freedom of the press. By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what it is I’m talking about.

I’ve been a storyteller my entire professional life. In my day job as the legal director at Open Communities, I represent people facing eviction, foreclosure, or housing discrimination who can’t afford lawyers. My job is simple: tell my client’s story. Tell it truthfully. Explain why this person doesn’t deserve to be on the street, homeless, because they lost their job, or because of the color of their skin. My job for Fangraphs is similar, though – usually, at least – the stories are of less import. Until, that is, this weekend.

 

 

I won’t deny that the Addison Russell saga is personal for me. I explained why for Fangraphs last year, with a piece that I was honored to receive a SABR award for writing. So the idea that an organization – a powerful organization, like the Cubs, with flagship radio and television stations and ownership connected to the politically powerful – would willfully try to shape how our society views a domestic abuser was alarming to me. It should, I’d argue, be alarming to everyone. I’m not going to opine here about whether Russell is or should be deserving of a second chance; that’s irrelevant now. And my point was never to denigrate the man. Rather, my point was that when a powerful entity tries to control how the media portrays an abuser for its own gain, that damages all of us. It normalizes abuse. It makes the abuser, rather than the victim, a sympathetic figure. 

These kinds of narratives are why women don’t report abuse. They’re why rape culture exists. And they’re why people felt comfortable telling me, in some detail, the process they would use to rape, kill, and dismember me. The first death threat I received Wednesday morning – the one that began by calling me a “crusty tranny dyke” – spanned three pages of this kind of detail. Why? Because the writer accused me of ruining Addison Russell’s life. You see, when you deliberately paint an abuser as a redeemed figure, you make it acceptable to abuse others. If abuse is a redeemable mistake, abuse becomes a trivial matter, and demands for accountability become the greater evil.

 

 

When Julian Green was saying that I had “absolute power unchecked” – he knew very well what he was doing. Of course, I had no such thing. But that’s the very essence of misogyny. 

When Julian Green was saying that I had “absolute power unchecked” – he knew very well what he was doing. Of course, I had no such thing. But that’s the very essence of misogyny, you see.Saying a woman has “absolute power” will inevitably lead to men trying to undo that power, especially when it hits a nerve those men see in themselves, like domestic abuse. Threats of rape are the ultimate way of removing women’s power.

Threats of rape aren’t about sex – they’re about power. There is something primal about the fear that comes with being threatened with rape. It’s a threat to take away your autonomy, your agency, your sexuality – and in so doing it does take away your autonomy, your agency, your sexuality. There are few things which can make you feel so powerless. Everything the Cubs did was about eliminating my power. Suddenly, when 670TheScore was talking about me, I wasn’t even allowed to be a lawyer anymore. Instead, I was listed as a person “whose Twitter account says she’s a lawyer.” It would have been easy enough to look it up, but they had to cast doubt on every one of my credentials.

And there’s little doubt that Green made a conscious decision. After all, a number of media members, reporters, and commentators – largely cishet white men like Mike Gianella, Herb Lawrence, and even Paul Sullivan – tweeted confirmations that what I had said was accurate. But Green didn’t go after any of them. He went after only the woman, and told a radio audience that woman was abusing her power. He may not have sent the rape threats himself, but he got exactly the response he was hoping for. Every woman knows that when a man publicly says you have too much power, he’s inviting the mob to put you in your place.

 

 

Take the threat which began “crusty tranny dyke.” That one went on for three interminable pages, describing how I would be raped, dismembered, and murdered. I didn’t read the whole thing before I blocked the sender, vanishing the message. But the memory stayed, burned into my subconscious. It’s impossible to read how a man is going to brutalize you so you will know your place without being changed. 

I was mocked for having a “GoFundMe” to pay for my transition surgery. The GoFundMe is humiliating enough – having to out yourself is brutal as it is – but having people spread the lie that I made this up to get money for my surgery is transphobic as hell. And that’s when the misgendering started, calling me a “TG Wannabe” and a man. Evidently, “TG Wannabe” became my new moniker on Reddit. Some threats even referenced my surgery.

Later on Wednesday, I was receiving so many of these terrifying messages that when a phone number I didn’t recognize called me on my cell phone, I froze and panicked, convinced that the caller was yet another threat. It wasn’t – it was actually opposing counsel on a case – but I was too terrified to answer the phone. I froze, utterly in shock, until I collided with the car in front of me. I was still hyperventilating when the police arrived – not from the crash, but from the fear. What if one of these people came and raped me whilst I was at the accident scene, unable to leave?

I spent hours crying in my wife’s arms. It impacted her, too; you can’t watch your spouse go through something like this without going through it with her. She was resolute the entire time, wiping my tears, telling me it would be okay, urging me to be proud of who I was and the stand I had taken. As the world closed in around me, she tried to hold it back with her bare hands. It was amazing and terrifying to watch, as the strain of what she was trying to do tested her. She didn’t sleep at all that week, keeping a watchful eye out in case someone decided to act on their threat in the middle of the night. My wife, who has lived in and around Chicago her entire life, watched as her home turned on her family. And when she didn’t think I could hear, she cried too. 

Before Julian Green reached out to Fangraphs, he didn’t reach out to me. In fact, he and I have never spoken. I didn’t mention him in my tweets, although his unflinching insistence that I was talking about him is pretty clear evidence I struck a nerve. Only two people reached out to me for a comment. Bill Baer talked to me before he wrote his story for NBC Sports. And Gabe Fernandez with Deadspin not only asked for a comment, but also asked for permission to use my name given the threats I was receiving, a courtesy I very much appreciated. Paul Sullivan, whose article in the Chicago Tribune rather backhandedly threw shade in my direction for making my account private (and made no mention of the threats I was receiving as the reason why), didn’t reach out to me at all. Neither did anyone from the Mully and Haugh show on 670TheScore, despite having Julian Green on the radio for a prolonged rant impugning my integrity. Green himself also didn’t talk to me before his screed, which ignited a new round of threats. Once the threats couldn’t come through Twitter, the threats came to my “Sheryl Ring, Esq.” facebook page, so I deleted that. Then they came through Instagram, so I made that account private. The sheer volume of hate was too much; I deleted the Twitter application from my phone, and let Meg Rowley and David Appelman at Fangraphs, and Jessica Quiroli at All Heels On Deck, know I was taking a leave of absence until the storm of harassment had passed. 

I don’t know when it will be safe to write again. I’m writing this, even though I know it will make things worse again for a while, because it’s important that people know and understand what happened here. I broke a story – a true story - about a powerful organization’s protection of a domestic abuser. Men with that organization responded with dog whistles that led to me receiving rape and death threats. There’s no better confirmation that my story was true than in how the Cubs responded. Misogyny, you see, doesn’t – can’t – hide. The Cubs organization valued the men who reported on my story. The only woman? She got thrown away. Silenced. Told to go back to the shadows. All so they could sell Addison Russell, abuser of women, as redeemed by playing a game.

It’s almost as if the Cubs don’t view women as human beings.

 

You can request to follow Sheryl Ring @Ring_Sheryl 

You can donate to her transition fund on her gofundme page-- https://www.gofundme.com/sheryl039s-transition-fund

 

Sheryl Ring: The Cubs, Laura Ricketts Fail to Show True Support for Queer Community + The Betsy Devos Connection

On Betsy DeVos, the Ricketts Family, and Why Representation Matters

The queer community, a longstanding pillar of the Chicagoland area and an integral part of the Second City’s history, has long been linked with the North Side’s venerable baseball team. Back in 1981, the Cubs’ AAA affiliate in Iowa was run by an openly gay part-owner and executive, Rich Eychaner. The team’s annual pride night, called “Out at Wrigley,” was started in 2001 and is Major League Baseball’s longest-running queer pride event. The Cubs have long had a float in the city’s annual pride parade. In short, there’s no way to separate the Cubs from the city’s queer history.

Or there wasn’t until relatively recently. In 2009, the Tribune Company sold the Cubs franchise and Wrigley Field to the ultra-conservative Ricketts Family, which for decades had been heavily involved in Republican politics. Joe Ricketts, the family patriarch, is the billionaire founder TD Ameritrade and bankroller of GOP presidential campaigns, including a million-dollar donation to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. He’s also the figure behind the family’s recent racist email scandal and a longtime holder of white nationalist views. Joe Ricketts have four children who hold equally odious views. Pete Ricketts is governor of Nebraska and an employer of white nationalist aides. Todd Ricketts is the national campaign chairman for Donald Trump. Tom Ricketts, who is chiefly in charge of the Cubs’ operations, recently partnered the team with Sinclair Broadcasting, a media conglomerate that requires that the television stations it owns run virulently homophobic and transphobic content, misogynistic drivel attacking victims of sexual assault, and pro-Trump pieces. As an example of the type of people Sinclair employs, its chief meteorologist is known for referring to trans people publicly as “things” and “its.”

Then there’s Laura Ricketts, Joe’s daughter.

Laura Ricketts, a former litigation attorney, co-owns the Cubs and is the first openly lesbian co-owner of a Major League Baseball team. On the surface, Laura seems refreshingly open to the queer community, despite her family: she’s a philanthropist for queer causes from Lambda Legal to Howard Brown. She fundraised for Barack Obama. At first, Laura’s influence seemed to keep the Cubs squarely in the center of the queer community; in 2011, for example, at her urging, the Cubs became just the second MLB team to join the “It Gets Better” project. But as time went on, it became clear that Laura had less and less influence into how the team was being run. For example, in 2018, the Cubs acquired second baseman Daniel Murphy, who was known as much for his bat as for his repeated homophobic comments about the gay “lifestyle.” Laura defended the trade after discussions with her brothers. But the team’s acquisition of an openly homophobic player caused massive backlash among the city’s queer population and the team’s sizable LGBTQ fanbase.

In one move, the team had gone from the heart of the city’s queer community to well outside it, and Laura Ricketts had taken the side of her homophobic family.

 

But the reality is that Chicago’s queer community should never have had faith in Laura Ricketts to preserve the Cubs’ ties to the LGBTQ community at all – not necessarily because she wasn’t up to the task, but rather because she was always a flawed messenger. Remember, Laura comes from a remarkably conservative, homophobic family. For some – even most – queer people, having a relationship with an intolerant family isn’t even possible. Laura’s privilege was her family’s money, and in order to accept that money she turned away from the worst excesses of her family regardless of whom they supported. And lest you think that this is just about politics, it’s not. You see, we learned all we needed to know about Laura Ricketts when she participated in the purchase of the Cubs.

Why? Because the Ricketts family, as odious as it is, isn’t the most homophobic or racist family involved. That distinction instead belongs to their minority partner in the Cubs ownership group, the Devos family. Yes, as in Betsy DeVos, secretary of education.

The DeVos family was known for its questionable morals long before Betsy sat before Congress and admitted to intentionally rolling back protections for trans students because of the data showing increased suicide rates for trans children. Family patriarch Richard DeVos, who made his money with AmWay, a multi-level marketing scam that was probably illegal, and he and Betsy, his daughter in law, spent it on homophobic causes. In the 20 years before the DeVos family purchased a stake in the Cubs, they donated more than six million dollars to organizations supporting conversion therapy – with Betsy leading the way. She bankrolled efforts which she said would “confront the culture in which we all live today in ways that will continue to help advance God’s Kingdom, but not to stay in our own faith territory,” and compared queer people to pigs.

In 2015, most of this was already publicly known. But the Ricketts family sold about 10% of the team to the DeVos family to finance the renovations of Wrigley Field anyway, and gave them an advisory role with the team. Laura, it should be noted, said nothing publicly, and did nothing publicly, to oppose the sale. There are no reports that she did anything to oppose the sale privately either.

And if you still don’t believe me, remember this. Laura Ricketts is a queer woman who sits on the Board of the Chicago Cubs. And yet she said not a word when the Cubs traded for domestic abuser Aroldis Chapman. She again said nothing when the team tendered a contract to domestic abuser Addison Russell. And yet, she has no problem playing Kingmaker in Chicago politics. If she won’t stand up against domestic violence and institutionalized misogyny by her team despite being a woman, why are we expecting her to speak up on behalf of queer people because she’s queer? In fact, she’s doing the opposite: using her position to shield her bigoted family from criticism over decisions like the Murphy trade.

 

So for those people torn about whether the Cubs are still a queer-friendly organization, I would argue you have your answer already.

Laura Ricketts, whether intentionally or otherwise, has allowed herself to be tokenized as the friendly, female, queer face of an ownership group that is ardently and effectively campaigning for the elimination of queer people and the subjugation of women. As much as Laura Ricketts is a lesbian, she’s also rich and white – two privileges which many people in our community don’t have. And she’s using those privileges to the detriment of women and queer people alike.

 

Sheryl Ring's Baseball Talk: Lance Berkman's Transphobic Beliefs Forgotten with "Good Guy" Label

One of my favorite parts of the offseason is baseball Hall of Fame voting. There are the player profiles, like these from Jay Jaffe, that remind you of the great players of just a few years ago. There are the hot takes – so many hot takes – about who should be in and who shouldn’t. And if you’re at all like me, there’s the endless refreshing of Ryan Thibodeaux’s Hall of Fame ballot tracker, watching childhood favorites like Mike Mussina and Edgar Martinez grow closer and closer to induction.

But as I watched this past year’s Hall of Fame debate, I was struck by something. Each cycle, we discuss the meaning of the character and integrity clause on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

We talk about it, most often, in the context of performance enhancing drugs, when we debate the eligibility of players like Barry Bonds. For the first time this cycle, we started talking about the need to consider character and integrity to the context of the #MeToo movement, with players like Roger Clemens, who groomed Mindy McCready for a sexual relationship beginning when she was fifteen years old, and Andruw Jones, who threatened to choke his wife to death – and actually tried. We talked about the character and integrity clause when it comes to players like Curt Schilling, who has compared Muslims to Nazis and called for the lynching of journalists. But however you fall on the question of how to treat this sort of behavior in the context of the character and integrity clause, we at least talked about it. We started a conversation.

Not so with Lance Berkman.

Lance Berkman is one of the sport’s good guys. Or, at least, he’s supposed to be. Bleacher Report talked about how scandal-free he was when writing up his candidacy. Bloggers talked about how underrated he was as a player.

https://twitter.com/brianmctaggart/status/1084920071267512320?s=20

No one talked about the character and integrity clause when it came to Berkman. No one even mentioned it. I couldn’t find a single article from a major publication about whether Berkman satisfies the character and integrity clause.

Jay Jaffe, my colleague at Fangraphs who did his usual admirable job of presenting other candidates’ more egregious behavior, didn’t mention it. And why would they? Berkman’s one of the good guys, right?

Good guys don’t go on television to call trans women “troubled men.”

https://youtu.be/Gdqfv9aGbgM

Yes, that is Lance Berkman in a 2015 major market political campaign ad opposing the rights of trans women to use women’s bathrooms. That’s him introducing himself by invoking his baseball bona fides. And yes, that is former Hall of Fame candidate Lance Berkman saying that trans women are nothing more than “troubled men.” You see, Houston, Texas had a proposed ordinance that would protect trans women from discrimination, particularly in bathrooms. And Berkman became heavily involved in opposing it. Not only that, though: Berkman didn’t just oppose the ordinance, he actively trumpeted the invalidity of trans people, particularly trans women.

"My wife and I have four daughters. Proposition 1 would allow troubled men who claim to be women to enter women’s bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms," said Lance Berkman.

And because that wasn’t enough, Berkman made a second video explaining his reasoning for doing the ad. This video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3oSDzZxdyg&feature=youtu.be

And in that second video, “good guy” Lance Berkman, he who was so above reproach that the character and integrity clause was considered a mere formality in his Hall of Fame case, said this:

Who knows what the intent of that person might be. They truly might think they're a woman, which is a little strange to me. But they could be a child predator. They could be somebody that's in there who likes to look at women and just claims to be a woman. ... If we're going to go down to the zoo, I just want to be able to live life without having to have an extra thing to worry about when it comes to protecting my family. ... It's crazy. It makes me want to say... 'wake up, America!' And that's what I want to scream at people because, what are we doing here? We have the potential for men going into a woman's bathroom. The very few people that this could be slanted as discriminating against, is it worth putting the majority of our population at risk... to appease a very small minority of the population? I don't think so. I think it's crazy, and it's unbelievable that we're even talking about this. ... We have to try to rise up against this threat, and the only way we can do that is go and vote 'No' against Proposition 1.

Amazingly, Berkman wasn’t done yet. Those videos were turned into radio ads that blanketed the Houston metro area. Unsurprisingly given Berkman’s stature, the proposed ordinance went down in defeat. Berkman went on KTRH 740 AM to talk about how he was the victim of “digital persecution,” and that “I felt that I had an obligation to stand for what is right.” And then came this:

"To me tolerance is the virtue that’s killing this country. We’re tolerant of everything. You know, everything is okay, and as long as you want to do it and as long as it feels good to you then it’s perfectly acceptable do it. Those are the kinds of things that lead you down a slippery slope, and you’ll get in trouble in a hurry," said Berkman

And still, after months of being the face of a political campaign that successfully demonized an entire already-oppressed community, Berkman still wasn’t done. He then gave an interview to Craig Calcaterra, doubling down yet again on his hatred of the trans community.

"It’s not an easy topic. You’re taking their word for it, saying that’s the way they’re born," Berkman explained. "The issue is, what to do about a 15 or 16-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl and wants to shower with the girls? Maybe he is [transgender], maybe he’s confused. But I wouldn’t want him in the shower with my daughters. We shouldn’t have the rights of 2% of the population trump the rights of the other 98%. Is it a mental choice? I don’t know. But it’s a Pandora’s Box."

So in the span of four months, Lance Berkman said trans women were “troubled men,” accused the entire community of being predators, said tolerance was killing the United States, implied trans people are lying about their gender, called being trans a “mental choice,” and said that trans people aren’t entitled to legal protections because we’re so small a population.

This was just four years ago. And yet, despite how high-profile that campaign was, despite the fact that Berkman’s campaign ads are still up on Youtube . . . the entire affair was completely forgotten. The Cardinals even honored Berkman for his faith on “Christian Day” in 2017, despite protests from the queer community. Since then, in mainstream media and culture, Berkman’s rols as the face of a movement inciting hate and violence towards an entire marginalized community was completely ignored and forgotten.

But that matters. Or, at least, it should matter. In an era where we rightly talk about whether or not statutory rape and domestic violence should keep someone out of the Hall of Fame, trans rights are not less important. Nor is this issue mooted by the fact that Berkman didn’t get in anyway. Berkman didn’t get into the Hall of Fame because of a crowded ballot, not because of his comments on trans people. In fact, those comments were completely ignored at best, and celebrated at worst. If Berkman had been elected, no one would have batted an eye.

You can follow Sheryl on Twitter @Ring_Sheryl