Jon Morosi's "Baseball Selfie" Idea is Bad, And He Should Feel Bad

Without hyperbole, this might be the most laughable column I’ve ever read. FOXSports.com’s Jon Morosi, ostensibly hired to #engage an online audience, offered up the following #idea after watching Italian soccer star Francesco Totti take an in-game selfie on Sunday:

As I watched the scene at Stadio Olimpico from a continent away, my thoughts wandered back to the sport I cover: Baseball should do something like this.

The idea isn’t that farfetched — at least, it shouldn’t be.

Major League Baseball could place one portable camera near the instant-replay module in every ballpark. (Outside the dugout, to guard against sign-stealing and the like.) But a player who isn’t in the game — the designated tweeter, if you will — could leave the dugout and summon the camera, in the same way umpires beckon the instant-replay equipment.

Pose. Capture. Tweet. The whole process should take about 30 seconds.

If you’re concerned about pace of play — as outgoing commissioner Bud Selig certainly is — then limit the in-game selfie to the home team, once per game. The only permissible times would be when the game’s pitch-to-pitch rhythm already has come to a stop (e.g., home run, end of an inning, pitching change).

WHAT?

Morosi is around my age (31), was hired to write for this newfangled outlet called the interwebz, and went to Harvard. So he should, um, get social media. But proposing that Major League Baseball install a selfie cam for forced #buzz should be a fireable offense.

His argument that MLB lags severely behind the NBA and NFL in their social media efforts is partly right. While baseball is on the bleeding edge with stuff like streaming video (MLB.tv through MLB Advanced Media was years ahead of its time) and in-game connectivity (MLB app brings food to seat, the league will be an Apple Pay partner in 2015), it is behind when it comes to marketing the game online. Where the NBA and NHL are great about letting highlights and clips on YouTube, MLB has been – how can I say this kindly? – a fucking train wreck in that regard. Young people live on YouTube. MLB is just now coming around on letting their highlights be coinhabitants with fans who use the video streaming site. The league has (or had) weird rules about tweeting less than 30 minutes before first pitch. They wouldn’t let websites embed their videos until 2013. In other words: they’re out of touch on some things, at least compared to the other leagues. It’s even worse with certain teams, Phillies.

But what makes social media work is the organic, spontaneous nature of Tweets, posts, ‘Grams, Pins, Vines and Snaps. Totti’s selfie was a hit, I suppose, because it came just moments after scoring a late-match goal to put his team ahead. Having, say, Ken Giles emerge from the dugout for a forced stretch-time selfie would be a cringeworthy imitation in comparison. Sure, the selfie is trendy right now, but ultimately it’s just a convenient way to take a picture without handing your expensive device to a stranger. Powerful cell phone cameras have made snapping an image of yourself or you and loved ones a simple task, the same way Twitter has made it easy for entertainers, teams, businesses or media outlets to connect directly with their audiences. Selfies or Twitter – or, 20 years ago, cell phones – shouldn’t be viewed as some foreign entity– they’re just new, more efficient ways to do things. [The same logic applies to Flyers beat writers freaking out about Instagram last season.] We no longer have a distinction between a landline and a cell phone– it’s just a phone. But the problem with new and social media is that people like Morosi and mainstream outlets often treat them as if they’re gimmicks or half-baked fads. Terrible news broadcasts (usually local ones) throw hashtags onto topics just because. They solicit #snowselfies. They employ Vince Lattanzio. Social media segments are typically sidekicks to more traditional top-down, one-to-many segments, but all social media really is is a modern newswire (when you filter out the shit). A report from a respected reporter should be treated the same whether it came from Twitter or was printed in a newspaper. Comparatively, a selfie should just be a picture.

Back to Morosi’s idea: Having a bench player take a dumb picture just because it’s #ONFIELDSELFIEOMGZZZ is completely missing the point. A better idea would be to let a professional photographer on the field during mound visits, home run trots, etc. As I said, a selfie is a thing because it’s a convenient – and, yeah, fun – way to take a great photo, but that doesn’t mean you have to crowbar it into every circumstance just because it’s the soup du jour. Ellen’s selfie thing at the Oscars last year worked because it at least felt spontaneous.* But when the omnipresent voice at the Golden Globes announced that viewers could log on to a website to see red carpet GIFs and backstage ‘Grams last night, the whole thing had jumped the shark. If you try to create #viral #content, you’re often going to fail, especially if you’re a big corporation or media outlet.

Morosi also argued that it’s criminal that a baseball player like Andrew McCuthchen has a mere fraction of the followers that basketball player Kevin Durant has (agree) and that on-field selfies would help bridge the gap (disagree). The reason Durant has more followers is mostly because basketball – as both a league and sport – embraces stars. Baseball doesn’t. It’s more of a team sport, and MLB has done nothing to bolster the image of its stars. Jimmy Rollins argued this years ago.

Morosi ends with the following, painfully self-unaware graf:

When officials from MLB and the MLB Players Association talk about ways to better engage America’s youth, they would do well to remember that the pace of play matters less than how much fun kids have talking about what happens on the field. Only a handful of boys and girls can bring home a foul ball from a particular major-league game. Many more would find joy in the form of a retweet — for reasons the grownups don’t completely understand.

Boy, ain’t that the truth.

*It wasn’t.