Our company softball jokes are following people back into the office

Our company softball team was supposed to make work feel less like work. For the first month, it did. People from departments that rarely spoke learned one another’s names, and Monday conversations began with a missed catch instead of a project deadline.

Then the jokes stopped staying at the field.

One teammate struck out three times in a game. The next morning, somebody placed a toy bat on his desk with a note that said “for practice.” He laughed. By lunch, coworkers who had not attended knew the story. During a project meeting, his manager said, “Let’s hope your forecasting is better than your batting.” The room laughed again, but he did not.

Another player made an error in the outfield. A slow-motion clip appeared in a department chat with a caption about “the operations team dropping another one.” It was meant as cross-team banter. The person in the clip asked for it to be removed and was told not to take softball so seriously.

The strange part is that the people making the jokes are treating the league as unserious while using it to create workplace reputations. Athletic mistakes have become material for meetings, nicknames, and comments from managers. Players who never agreed to perform for colleagues now worry that joining the team gave the office permission to discuss their bodies and competence.

I am one of the organizers. I encouraged people to sign up by saying skill did not matter. That promise feels false if a mistake becomes office content for a week. Two newer employees have stopped attending, both citing scheduling conflicts I do not entirely believe.

The captain wants to send a reminder that game talk should remain friendly. Human resources language would make a recreational team feel alarmingly official, but a vague request has already failed. Managers are part of the problem, which makes peer correction harder.

My preferred rule is simple: no game clips or performance jokes in work channels, and no manager should use sports performance to tease a direct report. Friends can still joke privately when they know the relationship supports it. Others think that kills the exact camaraderie the league was meant to create.

Can company sports remain casual once workplace power enters the dugout? How would you draw a boundary that protects people without requiring everyone to act as if the games never happened?