It's Time We Take Eye Black Away From Baseball Players
Eye black designs have been a thing since the dawn of time. You go back to ancient days and warriors would smear dirt and mud across their face before going to battle. Whether it had a practical purpose, or done solely for intimidation purposes, it didn't matter. Once that made its way over to sports in the form of eye black, it naturally progressed from just painting a couple strips below your eyes into more complex designs. I might be a little biased here, but I think lacrosse players perfected the craft of eye black once the triangles were invented.
NCAA Photos. Getty Images.Still a pretty simple design, but more than just a straight line under the eye. It has more of a "war paint" feel to it, without doing too much.
Speaking of doing too much, we have to have a serious conversation about baseball players these days. There was a time when baseball was for dudes who love chewing tobacco, itching their nuts, and smacking the shit out of some home runs. If you were a baseball player, you were a man's man. You drank beer, you took steroids, you blasted balls into orbit. But no sport has become a victim of "Tik Tok culture" quite like baseball has. I mean just look at this shit.
What are we even doing here? Mark McGwire is rolling in his grave right now. The thing is that the little squiggly design isn't even all too awful. If he just did that on both sides, maybe we'd have something to work with here. But pairing that with the straight line down the left eye? Now you've lost all the practicality of the eye black. Now you're just doodling on your face. There comes a time when putting on eye black starts to become dangerously close to putting on makeup. This fella has found that line and cannonballed right over it.
I mean…that's a makeup tutorial. The moment you start breaking out the Q-tips to draw hearts into your eye black is the moment when you deserve to have your eyes get annihilated by the sun.
And sure, you could say that he plays for the Savannah Bananas, which isn't real baseball. But that seems to be the way baseball is trending. The Savannah Bananas are selling out ballparks left and right. Kids love this shit. And now you're going to have kids using Q-tips to make their eyeblack look pretty before every U9 travel tournament? We can't let that happen to our kids.
So I propose a 2-year ban on eye black in baseball. We need to get this under control before it goes too far. A 2-year ban will help flatten the curve and maybe give us time to hit a reset button.