OPINION: Why We Shouldn’t Have Published Mr. Met’s Op-Ed “Let Me Hit Children With a Baseball Bat”
By Drew Thomas-Nathan
LOS ANGELES, CA — Baseball mascot Mr. Met’s essay about wanting to murder children in cold blood published in our renowned paper was met with strong criticism from many readers (and Sack colleagues), prompting our editors to take down the offending article and review whatever screwy process led us to publish such a barbaric piece in the first place.
We still firmly believe that Mr. Met’s radical “pro-bludgeoning-children” stance represents a newsworthy part of the current debate. We believed we were giving our readers (who are mostly anti-bludgeoning-children) a taste of different, more bloodthirsty ideas they weren’t used to. We now know that goal wasn’t worth publishing an article with the sentence, “Young children are merely tees holding their soft, baseball-like heads for you to swing at.”
Given Mr. Met’s powerful position as Forbes’ number one sports mascot and the real life repercussions his words could have, Sack editors should have put his article calling to “score home runs with their skulls” under more scrutiny. Instead the editing process was deeply flawed, with most of Sack’s senior editors being too depressed to notice we were publishing a call to “separate kids’ craniums from their cadavers with only one or two swings.”
We let Mr. Met’s argument that “a metal bat is like an extension of the limbs, limbs given by our creator for the purposes of culling the nasty, pathetic infants of this Earth” stand on its own when we should have offered more context to readers, such as the fact that Mr. Met is not human and therefore doesn’t have a soul.
Mr. Met’s piece also contained numerous factual errors, at one point claiming that “younglings are the number one cause of overpopulation and we could end world hunger by bashing them into meat smoothies.” The first claim doesn’t make sense when you think about it. As for the second claim, that’s gross. Child meat smoothies are also a logistical and legal nightmare, and Mr. Met’s suggestion to rely on them has damaged the legitimacy of our publication.
The Sack of Troy is already implementing great structural change to make sure we never advocate infanticide again. Starting today every Sack article will be reviewed by a group of babies to make sure none of the rhetoric endangers their cuddly-wuddly kind. Also a scapegoat editor was excommunicated for life, but that’s not as sexy for PR as the baby board. Does the New York Times have a baby board? Do they? Well we do.
