Joe Maddon has been coaching baseball for nearly 40 years. After failing to making it in the bigs as a player, he started coaching in 1979 and it’s turned out to be a fantastic choice. He guided the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series in a century and appears to be a pretty decent fellow.
So when you hear what Maddon had to say during a radio interview with Spiegel & Parkins about Ivanka Trump, politics and anything in that area, he comes across as a guy that has been living inside a secluded baseball tower for 40 years.
Chill Whimsical Philosopher-King Joe Maddon speaks out against the great moral outrage of our time: people boycotting Ivanka's fashion line pic.twitter.com/H4PQH1L9GF
— Double Birds (@2xBirds) March 14, 2017
“The biggest takeaways from the last election, people need to learn how to lose. Learning how to lose is really an important thing to do. Everybody wants to win and we all like to win. I learned how to lose a lot when I was a kid. From that you learn how to pick yourself back up and do the right things in order to win next time.”
The knee-jerk instinct is to scream things at Maddon, because people who say “you need to learn how to lose” are almost always happy about whoever won. That’s where the mind goes, because every time you’ve tweeted about how you hate Donald Trump, someone with #MAGA in their bio has told you to learn how to lose. But what if Maddon means Democrats need to figure out what went wrong so that doesn’t happen again? That’s helpful.
But as he continues, “learn how to lose” comes across less as “get better for the next election cycle” and more “shut up already you lost you dumb loser.”
“The other thing, just because you don’t agree with somebody, doesn’t mean you get angry with them. That is really prominent these days. That’s all I’m hearing, is because there’s a disagreement, I don’t like you. Whether it’s not buying somebody’s product, with the president’s daughter because I don’t like him, I’m not going to like everything else about him. I don’t understand that method. So learn how to lose. If someone disagrees with you, don’t get angry.”
Oh, Joe. You are that guy in people’s mentions.
Yeah, in general, if someone disagrees with someone about something, that doesn’t make anyone bad people. But this isn’t disagreeing with someone who thinks A Knight’s Tale is a good movie or thinks seafood tastes bad; this is disagreeing with people who support Donald Trump, a man who joked about grabbing women by the pussy and is the leader of what has become a fascist regime out to discredit the free press, embolden Nazis, ban Muslims and so much more. People don’t hate Trump because he likes his steak well-done; it’s all the other stuff.
If your opinion is “I like the guy who has a Nazi as his right-hand man,” yes, you’re going to get other people angry. And when it comes to pressuring Nordstrom into no longer selling the clothes of Ivanka Trump, who has been complicit in all this, that’s an avenue of protest people can take.
Maddon probably doesn’t understand this because he has spent four decades taking in all information through the filter of sports. This person won, this person lost, so move on and suck it up. An election isn’t a 4-3 Cubs loss in May. Politics are things that actually matter in everyone’s lives.
