Although it's a lot of fun to rip apart bad sportswriting line by line, as I often tried to do at FJayM, I figured it was time to write about baseball on my own and give others a chance to rip me apart. I love baseball and I like to write, and hopefully the quality of the writing and ideas about baseball on this blog will reflect that.
Obviously, given the title of this blog, I don't expect everything I write to be 100% correct, airtight, perfectly thought-out, bulletproof, etc. Hell, I think even 50% might be a little much to ask. That's not the point of this blog. The point of this blog is for me to put out some ideas I have about things in baseball we don't think about all that often. Or that we tend to overlook even if it's right in front of our noses. Or things that we talk about all the time but that we don't talk about in a certain way. The point is to put those ideas out there and let them float around the ether that is the internet, just like the guy next to you at the bar puts his ideas about politics, religions, and beautiful women out there--just in case someone is listening and wants to hear it.
So take this with the grain of salt it deserves. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. Anyway, on with the opera.
I want to begin by tackling the topic of race. Not exactly the safest topic, but I figure this blog has zero viewers at this particular moment and may have more than zero at a later date. So this would be the time if any to stretch my brain muscles, as it were, around this oblong and protusive topic.
So look: everyone who follows baseball has heard and digested by now the words Torii Hunter exchanged with a reporter about Latin American players in Major League Baseball. Discussing the dearth of black players in the MLB, Hunter went out of his way to distinguish dark-skinned Latino players from black-American players, even going so far as to call Latin American players "imposters".
After the initial flare of public outrage cooled down, people generally came to the same three conclusions: 1.) Torii Hunter is a nice guy. 2.) Torii Hunter chose his words poorly. 3.) Torii Hunter is. . . well. . . right.
Point 1, though generally irrelevant to any discourse surrounding Hunter's remarks, is something nearly every sportswriter took pains to point out. Perhaps they wanted to distinguish between Hunter and other hotheaded players just looking to bait an adversarial press (eg Gary Sheffield). Perhaps they wanted to further highlight the disparity between Hunter's niceness and the implicit rudeness of his remarks. Or perhaps they wanted to remind readers of their "insider" vantage point. In any case, Point 1 is not a subject of much debate. Neither is Point 2. Even if we acknowledge that Hunter is completely right about Latin-American players being utterly distinct from black-American players, certainly imposter is the wrong word. Latin American don't mean to fool anyone, nor do they hope to gain from a possible conception that they are black-American. So Point 3 would seem to be the only source of controversy in this whole debacle.
Except--it wasn't. Hispanic players all around the league stepped forward and said they were proud to be distinct from black-American players. Having heard the Latin-American contingency weigh in, the rest of the sports-culture "Think Tank" fell alongside. Latin-American players aren't imposters, the thought process seemed to go, but they aren't "Blacks" in the way the majority of Americans think about "Black" and "White". Or as the (patently offensive) redneck figment of my imagination might put it, "That Hanley Ramirez, he ain't black--he's Mexican!"
Well, problems with that conclusion aside (where, for instance, do you think the ancestors of dark-skinned Cubans come from? And how do you suppose they got to Cuba), we're left with the overwhelming question: If we agree that what Torii Hunter said is more or less true (though poorly worded) then where is the controversy?
The controversy, it turns out, was bubbling beneath the surface of the headline. Though "Hunter calls Latin Americans 'Imposters'" made better copy, the really divisive stuff was contained in the deep cuts from Hunter's interview. After we stepped back from the "Imposter" stuff and realized we all agreed, we found that there was really something to argue about down there. Hunter's comments went on to say:
As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us. It's like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It's like, 'Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?' ... I'm telling you, it's sad,"There are certain litmus test's for racial point of view. I want to be careful how I phrase this, but there are certain litmus tests to see if people have a certain racial point of view. For instance, you might be talking to someone about the Middle East and all of a sudden you'll realize that they believe that the nation of Israel is behind everything wrong in geo-political relations. Or, you might be dating someone for two years before you find out that they think English should be made the official language of America. Or shouldn't. You know--it really depends on your perspective. But there are certain litmus tests to see what sort of racialist views a person holds. And although it's tempting to pigeon-hole people holding those views as racist--or at least, biased racially--it's important that we take a step back and consider where these people's views are coming from.
One of these litmus tests that I find most perplexing (and yet, somewhat paradoxically, most understandable) is the view that a lot of black baseball players (or former baseball players) seem to have that baseball is more interested in cultivating Latin American talent than black-American talent. To the majority of people in America that seems foolish. Like laughably foolish. I mean, the decline of the black American athlete in Major League Baseball seems to dovetail almost exactly with the proliferation of the black athlete in the NFL and the NBA (as well as the meteoric rise in popularity of those two sports leagues. Further, the salary structures and success rates in those sports vs. that of baseball, coupled with the equipment demands and pickup-game-readiness of basketball and football vs. that of baseball, coupled with the idea that black athletes trend toward the lower-income tax bracket seem to spell out in the sharpest of Occam-ian terms that the trending downward of the black athlete in MLB is a completely organic thing. That it is not attributable to the black athlete being "harder to control" or "cheaper to sign" (especially since, to most of America, it seems that those two points are patently false).
OK, so it seems ridiculous. But consider where some of these black athletes are coming from. They may have grown up with black baseball players as their heroes. And those black baseball players--Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Curt Flood--were not just ball players who happened to be black. No, those ball players represented something bigger than baseball. Or at least they did to many young black players.
Willie Mays, for instance, was given a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. I believe the apocryphal (or maybe even factual) story goes that Joe Cronin sat in the stand with his back turned as one of the greatest players ever to play the game offered his services to Joe's perennially losing club. Hank Aaron played a couple seasons in the Negro Leagues. Dick Allen claimed (probably unfounded claims but claims nonetheless) to be the subject of racial persecution throughout his career. So one can see why someone born and raised on these players (and their own personal experiences with the very real racial prejudice in our country) might be quick to assume the worst.
And yet, though that may be a natural thing, an understandable thing, is it a positive thing? I don't know. To attempt to answer that, though, let me change gears for a second. A while ago, Tom Tango asked the question whether the MVP award should undergo a name change. Evidently, what few people know about the MVP is that it bears the name of the first commissioner of Major League Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
In this day and age, Landis is known for two and only two things: Kicking Shoeless Joe Jackson and co. out of basball, and for being a dyed in the wool racist who fought tooth and nail for segregation. There are many quotations out there where Landis speaks vehemently against integration, most of them containing that N-word we hear all too often when reading about baseball in the 20th century. Therein lies Tango's argument for changing the award's name: We should not celebrate a man partly responsible for the biggest blight on baseball's entire record.
What I would say is this: Landis did a number of things beside push aside segregation. He brought order and responsibility to a sport that had been largely lawless. Yes, he cleaned the gamblers out (or at least gave the impression that he did which--as Bud Selig would tell you, is just as important), but he also did his part to straighten out owner corruption, fought for players' rights (to some extent) and did his best to wipe out collusion in baseball (not that he succeeded completely). What is ironic about Landis is that while his racial attitudes kept baseball in the 19th century with regards to race, most of his policies helped to move the game into the 20th century in terms of competition, compensation, and industry.
That, I must make clear, does not erase what his racism accomplished. Segregation, as I wrote earlier, is far and away the biggest blight on baseball in the history of the game. Period. However, what do we gain by recasting a man as a villain when the truth is much more complex. If a man is unilaterally and vehemently racist in 2010 he is a terrible person. That we can all agree on (except, I suppose, those who are unilaterally and vehemently racist). If a person was unilaterally and vehemently racist in, let's say, 1776, he may or may not be a terrible person, but it is not completely on account of his racism. That, nearly everyone would agree (at least those who don't cast Thomas Jefferson as a monster of history. Granted, there are some who do).
But where does that leave the middle years? I'm not going to condescend to you as if you didn't know that "things were different then." Because by the time Landis was around, things looked a lot more like 2010 in regard to race relations than 1776. But the point is there is a nuance that is missing in any discussion of race that singlemindedly adheres to a single idea. "If you were for segregation in 1923 you are racist. If you were racist in 1923 you were bad." I don't get that mentality. Landis was in a position to heal the game w/r/t segregation and didn't. He shouldn't be honored for that. But should he be censured for that at the expense of his other accomplishments? When Landis had the MVP named after him, certainly no one was trying to honor his commitment to segregation (at least, not in itself). And if we were to demand the award be stripped of his name, we would be lobbying not to reverse the honoration, but to change the nature of it. From a refusal to recognize the nuances of the issue.
How does this relate to Hunter? Maybe it doesn't. But I think we have to look at this issue fairly carefully. Hunter is being singleminded about the cause of the dearth of black athletes in the MLB. That nearly everyone can agree on. But are we also being singleminded? The one thing that grates on me more than anything is when a person of color complains that something is racially offensive to them and some pundit (almost always white) says, "Why do we have to see racism in everything?"
What that jackass needs to be told is that we "have to see racism in everything" because racism is everywhere in America. This is a country with racism deep in its roots. It is here. In some ways it is stronger now than ever because it can never be acknowledged without forces pushing hard in every direction for silence. If something is racially offensive to someone it may be because they're being too sensitive. Or it might be because they have more reason than you to be aware of the various suggestions that stimulus holds which remind them of racial tension they have felt in their own life.
Torii Hunter suggests that baseball's lack of black players is racially motivated. We shrug it off as a paraonid person seeing racism where it is not. But racism is everywhere in baseball's history. Is it so silly to think it's completely gone? If Torii Hunter ever wins the MVP award (and I hope to God he doesn't because I hate the fucking Angels) he'll be receiving an award named after a man who fought tooth and nail to keep people like Hunter out of the game (and who allowed people like Al Lopez into the game). Is it silly to insist that that has anything to do with the way things are now? Perhaps. Probably. I would disagree with anyone who insists that he's right.
But I would argue that it's just as silly to insist that he's wrong.
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