From: The South Chicagoan
Torii Hunter, an all-star outfielder with the Los Angeles Angels, is getting some grief these days for comments he made to USA Today about the lack of African-American athletes playing professional baseball.
He told the newspaper that too many fans see all the dark-skinned ballplayers from the Dominican Republic or other parts of Latin America and just assume that the racial ratios are at an all-time high.
HUNTER IS BEING criticized by some for his comment that the dark-skinned Latin Americans are, “not us. They’re imposters.” Some say he’s slurring Latin American athletes. Others say he is trying to stir up an “issue” that does not exist.
Personally, I think he is merely speaking the truth. I wonder if many of the people who these days are posting nasty comments about Hunter all over the Internet are really just upset because he’s pointing out how flawed some people in our society are when it comes to perceiving race.
They want to think we have white people and other people. Hunter is saying that those “other” people have enough differences that it is wrong for the “white” people to lump them all together just because they’re not “like us” – as in the Anglos.
Hunter is coming at the issue from the African-American perspective – where some people wonder why a sport that once had about 25 percent black ballplayers back in the early 1970s is likely to have only 8 percent black ballplayers on major league rosters this season.
OF COURSE, THE force that fills that “void” is the growth of non-U.S.-born ballplayers – some 28 percent of people to be on major league rosters this year were born in other countries. While some of them are from Japan or South Korea, most are from Latin America.
And yes, those ballplayers tend to be proud of their own ethnic heritage, even though they come to work/play ball in the United States. They don’t want to be lumped in with “other.” Which is why I doubt that any Latin American athlete currently playing professional baseball is taking the least bit of offense to anything Hunter said.
They’d even acknowledge the reality of some of Hunter’s other comments, which is that the reason Major League Baseball teams have bolstered their scouting in places like the Dominican Republic or Venezuela is because they can get multiple ballplayers for the cost of one U.S.-born “bonus baby” who has attended college.
It is about economics, not any desire to do social good by expanding the talent pool or fan pool – after all, having all those non-U.S.-born ballplayers increases the interest level in the U.S. major leagues in Caracas or Tokyo, which means fans deciding they’d rather root for the New York Yankees instead of the La Guaira Tiburones or the Diablos Rojos de Mexico.
IT WASN’T ALWAYS like this. It used to be that the Latin American ballplayer was the rarity – there might be one, maybe two, per ballclub back when I was a kid in the 1970s (the time period when the black ballplayer reached its peak).
Although I wonder at times how much of that peak was because baseball people back then just lumped in Latin Americans or Latinos (who account for about 14 percent of major league ballplayers) with the black ballplayers as “other.”
I base that judgment in part on the “historic” significance given to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who on certain occasions in 1971 started an entire lineup of “black” ballplayers – even though three of them, catcher Manny Sanguillen, infielder Jackie Hernandez and Hall of Fame outfielder Roberto Clemente would now be thought of as Latin American.
Which makes me wonder how much that mid-1970s “black” ballplayer percentage is inflated, and how much better off we are now for taking reality into account when looking at the composition of the modern major league ballplayer.
I’M ANTICIPATING SOME dispute on this point by the fact that Clemente himself used to take pride in being a black Latin ballplayer. That is completely accurate, and Clemente was justified back in his day when he used to get upset with people who merely wanted to put him into a simplistic category – such as insisting on calling him “Bob” Clemente rather than by his proper name.
But it also goes a long way toward saying that it is overly simple-minded to try to think of people as being “white” and “other,” which means that in my book, Hunter is getting trashed by people who are upset that he’s calling out the flaws in their way of wanting to perceive the world.
Which means I’ll give him a few moments of respect. At least until the moment this season when he manages to make one of those over-the-fence catches that robs a ballplayer I’m rooting for of a home run.
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