Slump-busting blowup dolls in the White Sox locker room: offensive?

WFW.

 

The White Sox clubhouse always seemed like any other clubhouse to me, but I've only been there for big games or series, when it's packed with media.
Again, a reasonable, savvy manager would have handled this properly, and told his players to take it to a closed-off room, where they sacrifice the chickens and get their pedicures and all those other neat things we're not privy to. But the common room, that small piece of real estate where reporters are still allowed, IS everyone's office. My ratio to time spent in locker rooms to time spent in an actual newspaper office is 100-1, easy. And it's hardly unreasonable for someone to say it's not a good idea to display a blow up doll with a bat shoved up its butt in that office.

And Shoeless, if your point was to show how ignorant you are about locker room access -- equal access and rights for both sexes, as any rube sports journalist should know -- then you made it, loud and clear. You also were too dense to understand my point (and others) that male reporters go into women's locker rooms, all the time.
Hugs and kisses,
Martha Burk

 

I'm sorry, I just don't see where this is such awful behavior that it warrants Slezak's column or all this hand-wringing. It was a raunchy, juvenile joke in a place where raunchy, juvenile jokes are common and expected. Could it have been done somewhere off-limits to the media? Sure. But chances are the Sox thought that there was no need to hide it away, that reporters would look at it and laugh, or roll their eyes at the high-school level humor, and dismiss it, which is apparently what they did until Slezak got wind of it. It's interesting to note that of all the reporters who saw it, only two of them saw fit to make even a passing mention of it, with a couple of lines to lead off a notebook and a blog entry. That's about all it was worth.

I'm not saying that teams shouldn't be respectful of the people who come into their clubhouse. Of course they should. But even though we have jobs to do when we're in there, we are still visitors in their domain and we should realize that their behavior isn't going to conform completely to our sensibilities.

 

NBA locker rooms aren't "nudity central" either.

 

I want you out of here by the end of the day.

 

I wonder how female White Sox employees feel about their co-workers pulling this stunt. Did Human Resources get any complaints?

 

Since it was on the road, I think it's safe to say HR was not called. I think only two beat writers were on that trip, thus the amount of non-White Sox who laid eyes on the doll was negligible, making most of the brouhaha kind of silly.

 

Loved Downey's column on this today:

http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/cs-08-downeymay08,1,1147809.column

 

Downey's column is, well, bullshit.
We are all prevented from commenting on an issue if there are ads in our paper that might contradict what the column says?
Right.

 

It's a glass house. Before you take down the private antics of a private clubhouse--unseen by the public--why not take issue with the very public porn ads surrounding your own column?

 

Is someone advocating that the editorial department should be able to determine the ad content of a paper? Or that a columnist should know which ads are running in his/her section before he writes his piece?

Let's flip this around:

Imagine the shit storm if the advertising department was allowed to vet all the columns before they ran.