If You Don't Let Me Play, I'm Gonna Take My Ball and Go Home

In 1994, John Kruk showed up to Philadelphia Phillies spring training wearing a t-shirt.

He had just had surgery. Testicular cancer — one testicle removed. He came back anyway, ahead of schedule, against the advice of ownership, and he walked into camp wearing a shirt that read: "If you don't let me play, I'm gonna take my ball and go home."

It is one of the great moments in the history of American defiance. A man who had every reason to be bitter chose to be funny instead, and in doing so said something true about who he was.

I thought about John Kruk this week when I read what the Pentagon did.

A federal judge ruled that the Defense Department's press credentialing policy was designed to remove journalists the administration didn't like and replace them with ones it did. The judge called it what it was: illegal viewpoint discrimination. He ordered the press credentials reinstated.

The Pentagon's response was to announce that it is removing the press offices from the building entirely. The space journalists have used for decades — Correspondents' Corridor — closes immediately. Reporters can use an annex. Outside the building. When it's ready.

No timeline given.

They lost the ball. So they took the field.

There is a particular kind of child — not childlike, but childish — who understands power as ownership. If the ball is mine, the rules are mine. If the rules stop working in my favor, I pick up the ball and I go home, and I tell everyone who's left standing there that they were the problem. Most of us grew out of that somewhere around the second grade.

The building belongs to the American People. The Secretary of Defense — a man who has taken to calling himself the Secretary of War, as though the country did not spend considerable effort in 1947 deciding what to name that job and why — is the caretaker. Not the owner. He does not get to decide who watches him do it.

This is not an isolated case of one department having a bad week. The President who appointed him tried to bar the Associated Press from White House briefings and the Oval Office — while allowing other outlets to remain — because the AP declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico. The AP serves an international audience. The world calls it the Gulf of Mexico. The President wanted it called the Gulf of America. The AP declined. The door closed.

Same sandbox. Different ball.

Here I want to be precise about something, because precision matters. The First Amendment does not give the press a special seat at any table. It prohibits the government from silencing what the press chooses to publish. The responsibility journalists claim — to inform the public, to serve democracy — is one they have chosen to shoulder. It is a business model and an editorial commitment, not a constitutional mandate. The constitutional construct is simpler and more absolute: the government may not interfere with the right to publish. What the press does with that freedom is its own affair.

Which makes what happened here more damning, not less. The government did not silence anyone. It simply decided that if it could not have only the voices it preferred, it would have none at all. That is not a press freedom story. That is a self-portrait.

The Pentagon press corps now consists mostly of outlets that agreed to the administration's terms. The American People receive less information about their military, not better information. The only winner in that arrangement is the man who didn't want to be watched. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is not a security strategy. It is a temper tantrum.

It is a governing style — consistent, deliberate, and recognizable to anyone who ever stood on a playground waiting to find out whether the kid who owned the ball was going to let the game continue.

John Kruk played that season. Hit .302. He showed up with one testicle and more grace than this administration has managed with its full complement. He understood something that has apparently not yet reached the upper floors of either the Pentagon or the White House: you do not get to change the rules because the referee said you broke them.

That is not strength. That is a six-year-old who didn't get his way.

— Martin Alan Ginsburg | presrun2028.net