It is in the nature of those that cover a team, even in the capacity of a website that is centered around the fan’s perspective and analysis, to try to hold a more skeptical viewpoint of the organization’s public relations efforts. It’s why it feels strange to write a complimentary piece of something that would be normally overlooked by those that cover the team and fans: something in a press release involving a community-relations event.
The Yankees’ press release for their 15th HOPE (Helping Others Persevere & Excel) Week initiative caught my interest:
As a person who wishes we could rewind to a slightly simpler technological era, hope is not a word I associate with the current state of our relationship with social media. With all the serious discussions about the negative ramifications of the expansion of social media in our lives over the past decade, I was intrigued by an organization spotlighting some positive moments that happen on these platforms.
We do not fully understand what the negative ramifications social media has on the human brain, but in broad brushes, the early returns have not been good. I do not want to conduct pseudo psychology or sociology, but I can speak to how mentally draining the general discourse—particularly on X— is for myself.
Keeping it Yankees-centric, our Managing Editor, Andrew, covered in the Thursday game recap the difficulties of staying grounded and keeping things in perspective while following the day-to-day with the team. After a flaming-hot stretch, the team has dropped two straight divisional series. Naturally, this stretch has resulted in more vocal fans driving the conversation towards doom and gloom, fearing that the team is fraudulent. This Yankee squad isn’t guaranteed to be a World Series champion (it’s impossible to construct a team that could be, given the playoff structure). They may not even win the AL East, but they held the best record in MLB entering Friday’s games, with a pair of generational greats playing at their peaks. While this past week has been frustrating, at the very least, as Andrew said, last year’s team could only dream of having a stretch where they were 25 games over .500.
This is not to say that when the Yankees’ pitching collapses, as it did on Thursday, we should all jump on the game threads and say, “Well, they tried their best out there today. We’ll get ‘em next series!” That is not compelling discourse. However, in a small example of how many topics are discussed online, there tends to be a skew towards being overly negative, even when things are generally going well. I would argue this is a consequence of the internet inherently rewarding—and people like me remembering—the most extreme comments made in discussions. Analysis, all-in-all, should probably be more critical than complimentary. It is certainly more compelling, but there are times like this past week where things should be considered more in their entirety.
I write for a website covering the team with the most wins in baseball. Even so, I constantly aim to pinpoint problem areas on the team when brainstorming story ideas to pitch. It inherently makes for better analysis, and frankly, often garners more reaction, when you point out problems. It’s easier to analyze DJ LeMahieu’s inability to get any lift on the ball right now than to do a story about how good Juan Soto and Aaron Judge are at baseball (although we do feature plenty of pieces admiring the two!)
Spinning this back to the HOPE Week theme, I have to avoid falling into the same online trap that I often complain about—the prevalence of binary thinking where we fail to see an issue in its totality. The Yankees did a good job this week highlighting some positives that I often overlook on these platforms.
One honoree this week was Rehan Staton. He started working in the sanitation industry as a teenager to support his struggling family, put himself through college, and was ultimately accepted into Harvard Law. The video of him finding out he was accepted into the Harvard program went viral, and filmmaker Tyler Perry offered to cover his tuition bills after seeing it.
The Yankees also highlighted and honored this week the Experience Camps, a nonprofit that runs camps for grieving children who suffered the loss of a guardian. They saw their enrollment shift because of their online content.
HOPE Week gave me a few glimpses of people who fight the old newspaper phrase that feels more omnipresent with our social media consumption: “if it bleeds, it leads.” Whether you blame the news media for creating the content or the consumers for clicking and engaging with it, it’s all fueled by our evolutionary negativity bias. This bias is evidenced by the fact that negative story headlines spread faster than positive ones. One study I saw from Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, who has been covering our relationship with social media, was published in Nature Human Behavior. The study, called “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption,” looked at 105,000 headlines that accumulated 370 million impressions from the online newsgathering service Upworthy. It found that each negative word in a headline increased the click rate by more than two percent.
Zachery Dereniowski, known online as @mdmotivator, who lives by the mantra “kindness is cool”, is one antidote to this negativity-bias notion. He collaborated with the Yankees, as part of HOPE Week, to give 9-year-old Yankee fan Jacob Cohan, dealing with the tragic loss of his older brother, a remarkable Yankee’s experience.
This is the type of uplifting content Dereniowski posts as he has amassed 18.5 million followers on TikTok.
It’s not particularly bold of me to applaud and celebrate the team donating money to a variety of agreed-upon good causes, players doing community work, and the franchise promoting acts of kindness, all while putting together heart-touching videos in the process. However, as someone continually frustrated with the lack of civility and humanity in our online spaces, I appreciated the Yankees shining a spotlight that gives a brighter outlook on social media culture.
