The same sports press that can't stop genuflecting to Shohei Ohtani and Luka Doncic somehow keeps missing the American players actually delivering the results. Funny how that works.
The pattern is unmistakable. Foreign star arrives, coverage triples, and the guys actually doing the grunt work get treated like accessories. It's not an accident — it's a worldview. The institutional sports media would rather sell you a globalist fairy tale than acknowledge American excellence when it's staring them in the face.
Consider what the Los Angeles Times published this week. In a batch of reader letters debating Ohtani's two-way workload, one correspondent made a point the press refuses to: in the Dodgers' 2024 championship run, "I would argue that Freddie Freeman did even more" than Ohtani. That's not some crank take — Freeman's 2024 postseason was legendary. But good luck finding a Plaschke column leading with that. Instead, the Times' own Bill Plaschke declared Ohtani "led them to two championships," a claim readers promptly dismantled. As letter-writer Mike Schaller of Temple City noted, "last year, many others were responsible for their ultimate victory, not Ohtani."
Another reader, Danny Balber Jr. of Pasadena, called out Plaschke's medical expertise, pointing out that the columnist's track record includes "a lot of inane columns making bold statements that he usually has to eat crow on." The press anoints the foreign star, then circles the wagons when the narrative frays.
Now flip to the basketball court. Lake Show Life reported that when Luka Doncic — the Slovenian supernova — laid an egg against the Clippers, shooting poorly and coughing up eleven turnovers, it was Austin Reaves who saved the Lakers. Reaves dropped 28 points on 10-of-13 shooting with nine assists. An American kid from Newark, Arkansas, a late bloomer the Lakers developed in-house, and he played like the max-contract star Los Angeles paid him to be. As Lake Show Life put it, Reaves "stepped up in exactly the type of way he needed to."
Yet how much national press breath did Reaves get compared to Doncic's off night? The coverage still centered the foreign star's struggles, not the American player who bailed him out. That's the tell.
The sports media complex doesn't just prefer foreign stars — it needs them. Ohtani and Doncic fit a narrative: that excellence is borderless, that America doesn't produce the best anymore, that the game has moved beyond us. It's the same cosmopolitan instinct that drives the press in every other domain. American players like Freeman and Reaves are afterthoughts because they don't serve the story the institutional press wants to tell.
The question isn't whether Ohtani and Doncic are talented. They are. The question is why the press can't acknowledge that talent without sidelining the Americans who match or exceed it. When Freddie Freeman outproduces Ohtani in a championship run and Austin Reaves carries Doncic through a brutal night, and neither gets the ink — that's not coverage. That's editorial choice.
