Tim Anderson couldn’t help but think about it when he touched down in New York. The Chicago White Sox shortstop, one of the most prominent Black players in Major League Baseball, was back in the city for the first time since the biggest controversy in a career unusually rich with them. The short version: during a game in the Bronx last May, Yankee third baseman and professional instigator Josh Donaldson—a white man—referred to Anderson as Jackie, as in Robinson. Donaldson insisted it was meant as a playful joke, made in reference to a 2019 Sports Illustrated article in which Anderson said he felt like today’s Jackie Robinson. Anderson made it clear he took it more as a barb than on-field banter. Tony La Russa, the White Sox’s manager at the time, called Donaldson’s comment straight-up racist. The story went far and wide. Eventually Anderson responded by walloping a home run later in the series, delivering a hearty, “Everybody shut the fuck up!” after circling the bases.
This was all sort of par for the course for Anderson, who seems to find controversy whether or not he’s looking for it. As his star has risen, he has been unable to avoid the headlines. Whether because of the kerfuffle with Donaldson, for his tabloid-fodder love life, or for his baseball abilities—Anderson owns the league’s third-best batting average since the start of the 2019 season—it’s hard for him to simply slink into the shadows. Or to let someone else have the last word.
By the time we met at Lucille’s, a coffee shop in Harlem, with the White Sox in town to play the Yankees in early June, he’d had a year to reflect on the “Jackie” incident.
“I think it was childish,” he said of Donaldson’s remark. “We grown men! We don’t need to talk ever again. You don’t know me like that.”
“Now, I ain’t got no respect for you. You’re fucking with me,” Anderson explained, re-living the strange saga out loud. “His energy was all about trying to make me do something, trying to provoke me. I could have did something! But there really was no need to. Are you for real, or are you for real for real? Nobody is for real for real in the league. It’s just a waste of energy. If you really want it, I’ll see you after the game. On the field, you know they’re not going to let us get to each other! But I could see you walking to the car…” After suggesting that Donaldson intended to “stir the pot” amongst Black athletes with his comment, Anderson was happy to shrug the whole thing off with his playful, winking sense of humor. “I’m glad he’s reading my interviews! At least he’s paying attention,” he said. After all—making the Jackie crack meant that Donaldson had seen Anderson compare himself to the legend in the first place. “It was crazy, but it was cool, though. I guess he’s a fan of mine.”
Spending an hour face-to-face with Anderson—talking about that incident, but also the long, strange trip he’s had as a rare Black superstar in an overwhelmingly white league—helps to clarify why, exactly, it seems like he’s such a magnet for attention, good and bad. In conversation, at least, he’s disarmingly laid back, dripping with charming Southern affectations. The hoopla (the Donaldson incident, loud bat flips, being saddled with the dreaded “injury prone” label) only contributes to his long-earned sense that to be Tim Anderson is to constantly feel othered, singled out, misunderstood, and even an outcast among his own people. Growing up Black in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, baseball wasn’t just an afterthought—it wasn’t a thought at all. “Baseball? Nobody fucking plays that sport!” Anderson said of his mentality as a kid. Nonetheless, he’s become one of the faces of Black baseball in America—and intends to use his platform to connect with more Black people, both to supply more context whenever his name is in the news, but also to give them the comfort and confidence to navigate predominantly white spaces, baseball or otherwise. “If I do an interview on the baseball side, that may not touch Black culture, because they’re not watching that shit,” he explained. “But if I do something like this, or a podcast, or something that taps into Black culture, then they’ll understand me.”
To understand where Anderson is coming from, you must first understand how few Black players there are in Major League Baseball right now. At the start of the 2023 season, there were 59 Black American players on an MLB roster, comprising just 6.2% of the league’s player population. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, that figure peaked back in 1981, at 18.7%. Twenty years ago, it was still as high as 10.4%.
But the other thing you must understand is the way Anderson became something of a sensation. Things really took off in 2019, when he led the major leagues in hitting—and when the world started to get a glimpse into Anderson’s personality. He made waves with a viral bat flip and subsequent suspension, and with that Sports Illustrated interview. More recently, a string of other headline-grabbing moments, both on and off the field, have kept Anderson squarely in the public eye.
Black athletes willing to live unapologetically are guaranteed to piss some people off. And in a sport as specifically stale and pale as baseball, a Black lightning rod like Anderson attracts different, more pointed forms of hatred. But the most important thing to understand about Anderson is that he acutely understands this dynamic. As he told me while stirring his juice, this—the Why always me? of it all—is the price you pay for stardom. And make no mistake about it, stardom—the type that transcends sports, like Bo Jackson (not incidentally, one of Anderson’s heroes) achieved—is what he’s after.
“Everybody really hates greatness,” he said. “I mean, people hate LeBron! He didn’t do anything to anybody. It’s not my fault. I just want to be great! Being successful, there’s just so much that comes with it.” He’s acutely aware that his life is lived for public consumption. Anderson recently found himself in the news again, after it became public that he had fathered a child with a woman who is not his wife—a situation he’s happy to own up to, if not discuss in detail. The way he sees it, the stuff that gets people talking on the internet is but a small, albeit juicy, sliver of his life. He’s willing to let you talk about it if it means you’ll pay attention to everything else he has to say, too. “Everything that I’ve done—from the kids, to my love life, to the All-Stars and batting titles—y’all have it,” he offered. “I’m tryna be really different and be iconic. I want everyone to remember this shit. When my wave is done—you know how you see people walking around in jerseys? I want you to see my jersey.”
From Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Dillon Brooks, athletes have grown more comfortable being outspoken, especially with the ability to do so via their own social media platforms. But that’s still not super common in baseball, where players tend to present—to the public, at least—less personality than a loaf of Wonder Bread, and where the level of fame and notoriety pales in comparison to the NFL and NBA. All this makes Anderson—who welcomes media attention, viewing it as a way to both grow the game in the Black community and to provide his side of every story—a true one of one. He got to this position thanks to some hard-earned experience. As they say down south, he came from out the mud.
Anderson didn’t take baseball seriously until his late high school years—and only locked in on the sport because he broke both his legs in separate basketball injuries. “I ain’t really love the sport,” he told me. “I thought I was going to be in the NBA.” The lone offer he received out of high school was from East Central Community College in Decatur, Mississippi. As a sophomore, he hit an absurd .495, remarkably close to getting a hit in half of his at-bats. The White Sox picked him in the first round of the 2013 draft, and three years later he was in the big leagues.
But this wasn’t quite the jubilant experience most players have when they reach the pinnacle. He recalls coming up through the minor leagues and early years with the White Sox as a powerfully isolating experience.
“I had no friends in baseball at first,” he said with a startling matter of factness. “I had a mentor, but he don’t play baseball. He’s an older guy from back home. When I first got called up, I really felt lonely. I was the only Black dude in the locker room. I ain’t talk to nobody. I just played and went home.” Things got easier as he got older, and staying with one team helped. But he struggled to find teammates and friends to spend time with—people with shared interests and ways of seeing the world. “When I first got called up, I was definitely in a weird spot. Nobody was relatable to me. When we went on the road, I ain’t have anybody to eat with or hang out with. It was tough. I spent a lot of time by myself.”
He started bringing his friends on the road. They’re sitting a few booths over as Anderson describes the other important lessons that are now permanent in his psyche: nobody is going to feel sorry for you. A closed mouth doesn’t get fed. With time, Anderson realized he was only interested in being himself, regardless of how it might come off to people who wouldn’t ever get it anyway. “I really said fuck it and took control of the room,” Anderson said of this internal shift. “You’re going to know when I’m in the room and you’re going to know when I’m on the field! Nothing was going to happen from me being quiet. I don’t care what nobody thinks. I’m already in this weird ass spot, so might as well try to be loose and have fun with it.”
A notable instance of Anderson doing Anderson—and the broader baseball world responding characteristically—came during a game against the Kansas City Royals in 2019. Anderson punctuated a towering home run off pitcher Brad Keller with a bat slam so emphatic that, the next time Anderson came to the plate, Keller drilled him with a 92-mile-per-hour pitch. One of baseball’s unwritten rules, unfortunately, detailing the punishment for a player who dares to appreciate their work.
Keller was suspended, which was expected. But Anderson was also hit with a one-game suspension, with the league citing the language he used in response to Keller—specifically the part where he called him a “weak-ass n---a.” This left many, including Anderson, wondering why a Black player would get punished for using that word. “You gotta understand what Black athletes go through to get to these spots,” he told me. “It’s a fucking celebration, man! You think about all the shit we go through to get to this type of level. So, I was pumped up, and it was good for the game.” MLB has long struggled to find a balance between letting its players have fun and honoring the values of tradition and respect that the nearly 200-year-old sport was founded on.
The league is making progress—sort of, and selectively. “That next year, [the video game] The Show came out, and Fernando Tatis was on there flipping his bat,” Anderson recalled. “I found that weird because it was like, ‘Uhh, y’all stole the sauce!’ But if I was to come out and say that, I’m selfish. So now, I have to be quiet. It made me feel lonely again. Like, you can’t even celebrate your success? What do I gotta do? Now, they got celebrations for home runs in the dugout! We’re doing all types of different shit. So, just to look back and be like, ‘Y’all had to shit on me like that?’ I felt targeted.”
The years since have been hit and miss for the White Sox. La Russa, the manager who defended Anderson in the wake of the Donaldson argument, spent 2022 dealing with health issues that forced him to step away from the team, and officially left his post once the season was over. That meant that when Anderson reported to camp this spring, he was playing for his fifth different manager in less than a decade.
“Is it five?” he asked. I told him that, when you include interim managers, it is in fact five. “That’s played a huge role in my career too. Changing managers and changing the whole staff—I’ve been in the league for seven years, so half of those years I’m getting a new staff. I gotta make an adjustment every year. I can honestly say, this year has probably been the hardest because everything switched.”
Indeed, the White Sox are sputtering again, this time under manager Pedro Grifol. Grifol had never managed in the major leagues before; La Russa’s final season with the White Sox was his 35th as a big-league skipper. Going from one to the other was a major transition for Anderson, just like it was when La Russa was initially hired. That was not without its own controversy. When Colin Kaepernick was kneeling during the national anthem in 2016, La Russa told a reporter that he would, “to the best of his ability,” prevent his players from doing the same, going as far as to question the sincerity of Kaepernick’s actions. With Anderson and notable players of color like José Abreu, Luis Robert Jr., and Eloy Jiménez being big parts of the White Sox roster, the hire felt like an odd fit. Anderson remembers dismissing all of it as mostly noise, believing that it wouldn’t make much of an impact on him at all.
“I was like, ‘It don’t matter.’ He don’t do nothing but make the lineup card. But once the season started I learned. Dang! The manager plays a huge role!” Anderson admitted. The two were a bit of an unorthodox pair on paper, but they ultimately forged a relationship that pundits would have never predicted. “Tony was great for me. It’s still love. Legend. Hall of Famer! He taught me a lot and left little hand-written nuggets in my locker. I still have them. He still texts me. We still talk, not even like manager-player, but as human beings. He understood. He seen it in me, my drive. All that other shit don’t matter to me. As long as he put me in that one hole, at shortstop, I didn’t really care about the rest of it.”
Anderson says people underestimate the power that managers and coaches can have on an athlete’s confidence. “Even just a ‘Proud of you, kid,’” goes a long way, he said. I asked if he’s ever played for a Black manager at any level of baseball. After a very short time spent staring into the middle distance, trying to think of someone, anyone, Anderson responded with a despondent no. “The closest I got was the All-Star Game with Dusty Baker. That was instantly a good vibe, good energy. It’s a super connection.” He cited the 2023 World Baseball Classic—he played for a USA team with three other Black players and a hitting coach, Ken Griffey Jr., who is probably the most famous Black baseball player in the world—as a highlight. “Who the fuck thought I would be playing in the World Baseball Classic?” he marveled. “Shit was crazy. They could have picked anybody else but they picked me.”
For someone who seems to be constantly in the spotlight, Anderson is unusually accepting of his place in the world. The noise from crotchety old baseball men, gossip websites, and randos on Twitter is never going away. That’s fine. Anderson likes where he’s at. Of course, he can’t deny that part of him feeds off negative energy. While others promote relentless positivity and blocking out the haters, he is content with acknowledging his missteps and letting the rest fall into place. Not everybody is going to be on his side, and how could they? Anderson is living a life that very few people can relate to, and in ways his primary audience often finds confusing. As long as his boys from Alabama are still rocking with him, and he can keep roping doubles into the right-center field gap, he’ll happily wear the criticism.
“I still want to continue proving people wrong, hit .300, and be that dude in baseball. That Black guy in baseball who motivates and inspires through the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he said. “I ain’t trying to be too greedy, I’m just coming to get what’s for me. That’s it, man. 1-2-3. A-B-C.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Larryl Pitts
Grooming by Melissa DeZarte using Omorovicza
