David Wells is the New York Yankees legend who helped lead his team to two World Series wins while he was playing. He is also, it turns out, not at all a fan of woke culture or its creeping influence on the MLB, a topic about which he spoke during a recent appearance at Yankee Stadium.
That public appearance was for Old-Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium. Wells appeared but didn’t pretend to be happy with the state of the game or its sponsors. Wearing a jersey with the Nike logo covered up with medical tape, which he explained by saying that Nike is woke. Mr. Wells tore into woke companies, woke culture, and the woke MLB.
Beginning, The Athletic reports that Mr. Wells said, the medical tape over the Nike logo, that “We’re in a different world,” referring to much of the country’s drift to the radical left on many issues. Then, blasting the woke world, he said. “It sucks. That’s why everyone should carry a gun.”
Snapping about Nike, he added, “I hate Nike! They’re woke!” He was equally vociferous in his to-be-expected comment about Dylan Mulvaney-tainted Bud Light. When asked if he would ever drink it again, Mr. Wells said, “Nope!”
Then, discussing woke culture’s impact on baseball and how players are now coddled rather than treated with firmness by the managers, he snapped, “It always seems that the [general managers], the managers and all of that are getting fired, and getting blamed for it, and it’s the players’ [fault]. If you’re not doing the job out on the field, and if I was a GM, I would start sending a message.”
Continuing on that point, he said he would treat players a good bit more harshly, saying, “I don’t care who it was, if he was in the stink hole — pardon my French, if you can say that now. I don’t know. But send that son of a gun to Triple-A or Double-A and send him a wake-up call.”
He added that that is what the Yankees did in his day, implying that it is what the team did when it wanted to win. “They did it to me. They did it to a lot of us back in the day. You’ve got to send a message. I don’t care how much money you’re making. Send a message to them and let them go sit down there and think about it. That’s what you have to do. I think now they coddle them too much. They baby them. … It’s up to your peers to make you better,” he said.
Emphasizing that point yet again, he said, “They tell [players] certain things. To me, personally, it’s ruining the game because these guys don’t have free will to be themselves and go out there and find their own identity. Because they’re having an identity brought to them. There’s a game plan. Our game plan was go out there and win, how are we going to do it? The best nine guys are going to play.”
Featured image credit: By pvsbond – TBS Analyst David Wells, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10624605
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