Major League Baseball will no longer allow its teams to make rookies dress up like women in a longstanding hazing ritual. The new rule appears to be a preemptive bulwark against bad publicity that could crop up when photos of, say, a bunch of San Diego Padres newbies dressed as Hooters waitresses start bouncing around social media.
The Associated Press reports that, according to an “anti-hazing and anti-bullying” policy added to the league’s new collective bargaining agreement, teams may not even encourage players to participate in activities that include “dressing up as women or wearing costumes that may be offensive to individuals based on their race, sex, nationality, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or other characteristic.”
In previous years, players have dressed up like the women of A League of Their Own, female Olympic gymnasts, Princess Leia in a variety of Star Wars episodes, and cheerleaders with stuffed bras. Teams with less of a sense of propriety and humanity, respectively, made players dress in penis outfits or racist ones, putting black players in “pimp” costumes and Asian players in kimonos as the Philadelphia Phillies did.
MLB vice president Paul Mifsud told the AP that the league devised the policy “in light of social media, which in our view sort of unfortunately publicized a lot of the dressing up of the players.” In social media’s defense, it didn’t “unfortunately” publicize the costumes. Teams and players alike have tweeted out the images, and some have organized photo ops (plane rides, coffee runs) around the ritual. Mifsud is smart to recognize that it was only a matter of time before “social media” pointed out the offensive implications of wearing genders and races as costumes. “Although it hasn’t happened, you could sort of see how like someone might even dress up in blackface and say, ‘Oh no, we were just dressing up,’” he told the AP. Right.
The policy will also protect team members who genuinely felt uncomfortable with the spectacle, though they could still be required to dress up in costumes that aren’t specific to a race or gender. The AP offers Batman, Spiderman, Gumby, and “a giant ketchup bottle” as past costumes that will be kosher under the new rule. All you social justice warriors over at Heinz, start your engines!
