Dexter Fowler, baseball player, is a human being, too

Three weeks ago, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that is widely known as the “travel ban.” Utilizing our country’s system of checks and balances, this controversial order was subsequently overruled. However, reports are surfacing, after quotes from the President himself, that a new executive order has been drafted around the court’s ruling and may be signed as early as this week.

Politics are expressly banned from being discussed in the comments section here at Viva El Birdos. Respecting the rules of the site in which I write for, and because it is not in my nature to publicly discuss politics, I do not at all intend on turning this post into a dissection of foreign policy and/or human morality. Rather, I want to shed light on a very important issue directly involving St. Louis Cardinals center fielder and lead-off man, Dexter Fowler, as well as baseball players in general.

The issue is actually two-fold, with the first point focusing on the fact that baseball players are human beings, too. Sure, die-hard fans may view players as being on a some sort of pedestal, but at the end of the day, they, too, have families, they, too, have day-to-day stresses to deal with, and they, too, have feelings and opinions (and no, politics are not magically excluded here). They live in the same country as we do, and that does not change simply because they make a lot of money and are on TV almost every day. We are not watching actors on a TV show in a fictional TV world. Rather, we are watching human beings, who just so happen to be a lot more athletic than us, make a living in the exact same world that we live in.

Secondly, as fans of the game played by these same professional athletes, we crave access. We want to know exactly what our favorite player is thinking after he has a good game (but especially after a bad game). This isn’t new, either. Long before the introduction of social media (specifically Twitter, which has “changed the game” entirely), there were pre-game interviews and post-game press conferences. Players providing non-canned answers were often praised while those providing short, cliché-ridden remarks were criticized. Well, Dexter Fowler, baseball player, but also human being, was just openly criticized for doing the former.

In doing the former, Fowler was openly responding to a topical probe by ESPN’s Mark Saxon. And unlike most of us reading this post, Fowler and his family were directly affected by President Trump’s executive order (the details are in Saxon’s piece). Fowler could have easily shied away from Saxon’s question, but he would have still likely faced criticism, on the other end of the spectrum. Instead, as far as I can tell, he answered politely and thoughtfully — just as he has done for the entirety of his career.

At the end of the day, we, as fans, cannot remain hypocritical. If we want more access to players (I understand that some of you probably want less), it is best for us to first remember that players are human beings, too. There aren’t too many Dexter Fowler-types in the game today. Let’s not ruin the one that we have for the next five years.