Perhaps the weirdest thing about the all-out hysteria about masculinity among supposed “alpha males” is how bizarrely inconsistent it is. 

The men in question would have you believe they are big, strong paragons of manly strength who are the final arbiters of what it does, and does not mean, to be a man. But then they are reduced to squawling infants about ridiculous things that have no impact on their lives whatsoever. What is “alpha” about being so easily triggered? It’s extremely weird.

A recent major league baseball game gave us yet another example of this foolishness when Oakland A’s left fielder Brent Rooker got some baseball fans all in their feelings for doing about the most mundane thing a dad can do: feeding his kid.

Some baseball fans got angry when Brent Rooker fed his baby during a recent MLB game.

The nonsense went down during the recent MLB Home Run Derby, the annual home run hitting competition held before the league’s All-Star Game. And Rooker basically stole the spotlight, not because of his hits but because of pretty much the dumbest reason possible.

Rooker and wife Allie Oliver share two daughters, 3-year-old Blair and 11-month-old Blake. During one part of the game, the cameras cut to Rooker chilling on the sidelines, feeding baby Blake her nightly bottle. Awww, right?

Not for one fan. After Rooker took to X to express how much fun he had at the Home Run Derby, one baseball fan took the opportunity to call out Rooker for the supposed crime of caring for his kid. “Hey Rooker…did you really need to feed your baby on camera? Sometimes people just want to see you play,” the fan wrote in a reply on X.

Which is very, very weird. Like… you okay, bro? Did you not get to see him play? Did the sight of him feeding his baby somehow erase the game from your brain like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” What on Earth are you and the nearly 100 other people who liked your tweet talking about?

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Rooker was obviously annoyed by the tweet and had the perfect response.

The fan may have gotten 90-some likes on his tweet, but the response to his weird criticism was swift and overwhelmingly negative. And Rooker was among those who clearly had no patience for this ridiculous flap.

“Yes, it was necessary to feed my 11 month old child her night time bottle at like 9:00 pm. Thank you for asking,” Rooker tersely replied in a quote tweet that instantly went viral.

In the replies to the posts, many pointed out that a baseball player’s schedule often means he’s away from his family for large chunks of time for a huge portion of the year, stretching roughly from training in February through the baseball season’s end in October.

That ultimately shouldn’t matter anyway. What Rooker was doing was just being a dad, and an involved one at that. That’s a good thing, and it should be admired, not criticized. For his part, the angry fan’s take seemed to be that Rooker was using his baby for publicity, and that “babies don’t really enjoy being in a baseball field and used for PR stunts.” 

How he has determined this, given that babies aren’t able to verbalize their opinions about anything, let alone the intricacies of their father’s public relations activity, is anyone’s guess.

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People online applauded Rooker for being an involved dad and not accepting the criticism.

We live in a time where many men are so petrified of their masculinity being called into question that they’ve made entire careers out of telling men that having anything to do with their kids besides providing for them financially and teaching them to hate women or whatever makes them “soft” and “effeminate.”

So, Rooker, having no patience for this idiocy, actually matters. These same masculinity influencers would have you believe that nothing is more damaging to a child than an absent father, but then pitch a fit when a dad acts like a dad and feeds his kid. Which is it? Pick one.

In any case, Rooker’s clapback had people applauding him, both for being an involved father and for quickly putting his critic in his place. After all, if the sight of a baseball player giving a baby a bottle is so triggering to you, you can always just change the channel to something that doesn’t, snowflake.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.