re: What kind of NIL $ do our baseball players make?

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Group 1- thinks every college athlete is a millionaire now. And they use this logic to hate everything college.

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This one is strange to me. Not so much the ones who stretch it to hate the everything college—those guys are just miserable assholes that hate everything.

But the ones who use this logic to hate every college player who does anything that’s not 100% in alignment with whatever “bleeds purple and gold” romanticism they still naively are hanging onto. I’ve read versions of “they’re rich now. They get paid. They’re fair game.” to justify the incessant shitting on players at the schools they claim to be a fan of for months.

I’ve been on here for over 20 years (shite), and I’ve seen a lot, but nothing really like the constant beating that Yorke took for months. Even after he quit playing. And I was one of the 1st ones to really turn on him after he was barking at that pitcher from Nowheresville State for not throwing him a dick high 3-0 fastball while we were getting our shite pushed in by 10. That just really rubbed me the wrong way for some reason. And I kinda got shouted down—the crowd seemed to rally to defend him. Which was fine. But like 2 weeks later every other thread on here was hating on him.

It started fairly with criticisms of his consistently popping up, but turned to “he sucks because he’s fat,” then more into “he’s so fat he shouldn’t exist.” It was bizarre, but a fascinating look into toxic internet culture. Which happens all over the internet, maybe more so on anonymous message boards than anywhere. But there’s no chance this happens on here without NIL being a thing. Money brings out a strange collective jealousy made up mostly—I assume—by guys who are bitter at life and think that getting their pound of flesh will momentarily alleviate their suffering.

And they’ll take it vicariously too. Ton of threads on here calling for Jay to call out players, to say they suck, to cut them. One guy—I think he was serious, but hard to tell sometimes—was asking people to show up on Senior Day specifically to boo Jay and the team. Despite winning 2 of 3 in an era where teams don’t win 2 of 3, even Jay is afforded no grace. And it’s always the ones bringing up his $3 million/year salary that are most offended.

I’ve gone off on a tangent, but to bring it back around to your point, he probably made more, but if you’d have told me we paid Yorke $10k, I’d have believed you. But people were acting like we picked their pockets, raided their wallets, and paid him $1 million +. And this is not even a criticism, really, more of just an observation on how much and how quickly NIL has affected the lens through which we watch and talk about college sports today. It’s wild.