Derek Jeter gives athletes the chance to say something worthwhile. But will they take it?

If professional sports are the world’s last, best unscripted drama, then Derek Jeter is determined to break the 4^th wall.

On the verge of retirement, the career-long New York Yankee founded The Players’ Tribune in early autumn of 2014, a website designed to pull back the veil on the motives, private lives, and convictions of renowned professional athletes – despite the irony that Jeter, himself, was hardly ever candid with the media in his playing days.

Senior Editor and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson made waves on October 2^nd by penning The Players’ Tribune’s first entry, in which he confessed a violent past that conflicts glaringly with his cherubic veneer. “I’m just a recovering bully,” the Super Bowl champion mused. If it achieves nothing else, Jeter’s tribune makes us realize just how little even the most ubiquitously famous athletes reveal about themselves in public: the sexual conquests and tax problems and addictions and political theories of actors, musicians, and authors are largely public fare. But for a host of reasons, the full humanity of most of America’s athletes remains conspicuously circumscribed by poorly acted commercials, hackneyed motivational cant, and calculated PR gambits.

Of course, Jeter’s Tribune had the sad yet fortuitous fortune of having been launched in the midst of an ongoing discussion about the role professional sports leagues play in spreading social pathologies such as spousal abuse and corporate maleficence. When Michael Jordan famously retorted “Republicans buy sneakers, too” in response to a question about his refusal to denounce a segregationist senator in his home state of North Carolina in 1992, the tone was set for an era of evasion in professional sports, the likes of which we’re just now crawling out of.

On the other hand, cultural critics and sports commentators who ask that athletes “speak out” frequently do so over big-money media that make exactly the kind of outspokenness they call for improbable. The incursion of television and corporate sponsorship into the world of professional sports—a process that began in the 1970s—profoundly altered the political economy of the industry, establishing direct correlations between widely marketable superstars, widespread viewership, and increased marketability. The well-rehearsed scripts of professional sports, always concerned with how their acts play in Peoria, dictate that our winners be bland and humble as the imagined bread basket. It’s tempting to ask that superstar athletes “use their celebrity” to speak out on defining moral issues, but the platitude misses the point: namely, that celebrity and spinelessness in late capitalism usually go hand-in-hand.

It could be wondered that we’ve seen something of a departure from business as usual these last few years, and it might not be a stretch to say the sea change started here, in Seattle, with Russell’s Seahawks (perhaps, then, it’s no wonder Wilson wrote the first Tribune editorial).

I mean, it isn’t as if any of the Seattle Seahawks can be found picketing for rent control in the major city with the fastest growing rent prices in the country, or have denounced the role their home stadium’s namesake—the CenturyLink corporation—has played in the ongoing geographic segregation of internet service in Seattle. Lest we forget, the week they played them, Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll gave an eloquent but transparent dodge of a question about the appropriateness of the clearly racist mascot of Washington D.C.’s professional football team. Yet the stances they have taken—Richard Sherman’s blog posts, Doug Baldwin’s twitter rants about business practices in the NFL, and Russell’s recent rash of principled behavior—have endowed the team with a moral mojo that ought to make them the franchise of choice for anyone with social justice pretentions, the least-bad option of all 32 teams.

Earlier this summer, LeBron James used Sports Illustrated as a bullhorn for a remarkably lucid confession, the range and social ramifications of which were more than we’ve ever heard from a professional athlete since Muhammad Ali in the 60s. James is a millennial, and the influence of social networking on how athletes in particular and celebrities in general communicate with their fans is so obvious as to almost go without mentioning. So The Players’ Tribune is a product of its time, and I think it’s better that it exists than not. Any opportunity that we get to, as Derek Jeter puts it, hear from athletes “directly, without a filter” should be welcomed.

The problem is that similar promises have always been made by media of all kinds, even and especially those “up close and candid” interviews, which become vehicles for millionaires to sell themselves and the systems that enable them. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Jeter’s tribune can become an unbridled window into the lives of its authors, or whether it will simply be another brand-building platform for athletes with too much to lose to stop playing games.

After all: homophobic gun nuts who deny climate change and beat their wives & children senseless buy sneakers too.