Race and baseball
This isn't an essay about the racially-charged history of baseball. There's a lot of it, from the "Injun" players of the 1800s right on up to the racially-charged bad-boy stereotyping of last year's champion White Sox. You can get a lot of the history from the usual sources, and it tends to be covered well. I don't find the usual sources cover what's going on in the game today, though. What's going on in the game today, about race and culture and welcomingness.
*
Other Flatmate came home a couple years ago from sitting in the bleachers at Fenway to report this scenario:
Byung-Hyun Kim, a Korean pitcher recently traded to the Red Sox, is doing poorly on the mound. A drunken lout bellows: Kim! Go back to Pearl Harbor!
Bleacher bums are not known for the efficacy of their rhetoric. Still, Kim is Korean not Japanese; Pearl Harbor is within the United States; and as insults go, telling a Japanese person to go back to Pearl Harbor is kind of -- not? Everybody laughs at the stupidity.
Kim never felt comfortable with the Red Sox. There was a lot going on: he hurt his throwing arm; he wanted to be a starter and everybody else wanted him to be a reliever; except for his translator (also a trainer on the regular staff) he didn't have a lot in the way of friends; he differed in rehab philosophy from the conventional wisdom. Kim sucked on the mound a lot, after his injury. He never put it back together here. But -- he got traded at last in March 2005, to Colorado. They made him a starter. Considering it's Colorado, where ERAs are always higher, Kim hasn't done that badly. Certainly, he's done better there than he did at all in Fenway in 2004.
*
Baseball used to be a game of the poor: the urban poor, who played it in alleys, and the rural poor, who played out in the fields. It was a workingman's game, manual labor. Not many players went to college, and those who did were sometimes laughed at in the clubhouse. Baseball's not that game any more. Not all players go to college, now, but probably half of them do, and of those many graduate despite being eligible for the professional draft after their junior years. And as conditioning, equipment, and coaching become more and more important in players' lives, fewer and fewer American baseball players actually come from poor backgrounds. Most are upper-middle class, the kind whose parents build them pitching mounds in their back yards and have them on traveling baseball teams and sometimes even move to Florida or southern California to get better competition for Junior's development.
Where are the natural athletes in all this? Those guys who play with sticks because they can't afford bats and hit like killers anyway? Those guys who are such naturals that they don't need the best bat, best glove, personal trainer? A lot of them don't end up in baseball, because the paydays in baseball are geared toward longevity. After your initial signing bonus (which depends on how high you were drafted), you'll make as little as $5000 a year in the minor leagues, for several years, and even when you do crack the majors they don't have to pay you any more than $300,000 your first year. If it takes you five years to get to the majors, which isn't terribly uncommon, you're not exactly rolling in the dough.
Basketball can take a teenager and instantly pay him millions and have him in the starting five, if he's good enough.
*
Boston has a crappy history of race-relations, when it comes to baseball. The Red Sox were bad enough on the matter that people tar the whole city with that brush, forgetting how race-forward the Celtics were in the 1950s. The Red Sox were pretty bad, as a team overall, but they sucked at signing black players: they had an opportunity to sign Willie Mays, before anybody in baseball had heard of him, and wouldn't consider it. They were the last major league team to hire a black player, and he was a marginal guy called Pumpsie Green. As late as the 1970s, racial slurs were being said, in the hearing of reporters, by management (although by then everyone had learned to deny it). I don't know how much you can blame the city for this bad legacy and how much you can blame the owner, Tom Yawkey, who ran the team for decades like his own personal golfing party and not particularly as a team for winning.
Like most golfing parties, everybody involved tended to be white.
*
Roberto Clemente gets a lot of credit as one of the first Hispanic players to get a lot of fandom behind him. Although early commentators called him "Bob" (as they called Orestes Miñoso "Minnie Minoso"), and reported his speech complete with phonetic spelling, he gained a reputation as a good and thoughtful and outspoken guy. That he managed to die, while bringing relief to earthquake-stricken Central Americans, just helps cement his sainthood.
Thirty years later, one still gets the whiff that Hispanic players whose English is good are treated in the press better than those whose English is poor. Why put somebody up at the press table who will stammer? It's embarrassing to watch somebody fumble for a word, or shortcut his elocution because he can't translate the thought into English. (The union officially allows any player to answer press questions in any language they choose, and ask for a translator, but it almost never happens.) Those players become effectively silent, reciting the standard cliches but unable to put a personal -- human -- face on their triumphs and failures alike. It is that personal spin, the charisma and ease and turns of phrase and accepting of blame, that makes an ordinary player into "the face of the franchise."
The Hispanic players sometimes turn it around on the press. You'll see it at major events, like after the World Series, when attention requires that the whole event be shown rather than cutting away from the boring parts. There's Manny Ramirez up at the table, answering questions, and somebody from the Spanish language press asks him something in Spanish. He replies in Spanish, and offers no translation, and in the background you can hear reporters mumbling, "What? What did he say?"
*
Tony Gwynn is pretty universally regarded as one of the awesomer hitters of the 1980s. He's a big guy, fat throughout his career, cheeks like slabs and a big belly and thighs narrowing down to scrawny calves. He spent his whole career in San Diego, although he could have gotten more money elsewhere. He just liked San Diego.
He's a black man, by the way. He went to college and speaks elegantly, and has a high, fluting voice -- a little amusing in contrast with his gigantic body. When people talk about him, they say he talks like a white guy.
*
The Red Sox have taken awkward pains to make sure there's at least one black man on the major league roster, these past few years. Not an Hispanic black man, of which quite a few, but a non-Hispanic American-born black man. It's not terribly easy, any more: the percentage of black players used to be higher, and has declined to something much closer to the slice of pie black people actually occupy in the US population: 10-12%. There are still black players, from zillionaire superstars (Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield) to lesser-talent backup guys (Willie Harris, Jay Payton). There just aren't a lot of them, compared to the heyday, and nobody's really sure why. Everybody's got a theory:
* Basketball requires less equipment, less space, and fewer players, and holds out the chance of the big bucks immediately after high school.
* Football is sexier, what with the weekly titanic television contests.
* Other sports are much easier and faster to master.
* Baseball is a little boring, having no timeclock. It's hard to win people over to it, if they didn't grow up fans.
* As baseball has gotten more marginal in comparison to other sports, it has emphasized its traditional aspects more strongly. This is crappy advertising to people who are, e.g., into rap and floppy pants.
MLB's big idea is to sponsor baseball academies in inner cities, encourage poor black kids to take up this sport instead of the others. It works in the Dominican Republic, after all.
*
The Dominican Republic is a country with a huge underclass of urban and rural poor. Major league players often tell of playing with cardboard for gloves, balls made of paper and tape, weedy lots or alleys as their playing ground. Foreign players are allowed to sign free-agent contracts as young as 16, and kids do all the time. Most of them don't even make it to the US minor leagues, washing out in the Dominican academies or ending up in Mexican or Venezuelan leagues. A lucky few sock away that contract money and soldier their way through years in the US minors and stick with a major league club and find the right combination of factors and keep their health and end up as David Ortiz.
Until the last few years, kids were successfully forging birth certificates and signing at 15, 14 -- anything to get out.
Foreign academies have a bad reputation, thanks to years of training the body without taking any account for the intellect or social-psychological needs of the players. It's the job of an academy -- as with the minor leagues -- to chew up the players who won't make it and spit them out, while grooming the players who might make it for the next level. Kids get hopped up on disallowed performance-enhancing drugs, or nurse injuries in secret rather than get treatment, or get neglected in favor of somebody flashier. Kids make it to the US without having finished the equivalent of high school, and are dropped into minor league towns: Toledo, Nashville, Staten Island, Trenton.
Everyone's aware of the problem, and is slowly trying to make it better. Academies started teaching classes about how to handle a checking account, how to withhold taxes, how to rent an apartment. English classes are a big part of the system, now.
In theory, at least, it's getting better. The kids sign anyway, now as then -- anything to get out. David Ortiz comes home part of the year, plays winter ball in his old home town, and everybody thinks -- I could be the one who beats the odds, just like him.
*
Other Flatmate came home a couple years ago from sitting in the bleachers at Fenway to report this scenario:
Byung-Hyun Kim, a Korean pitcher recently traded to the Red Sox, is doing poorly on the mound. A drunken lout bellows: Kim! Go back to Pearl Harbor!
Bleacher bums are not known for the efficacy of their rhetoric. Still, Kim is Korean not Japanese; Pearl Harbor is within the United States; and as insults go, telling a Japanese person to go back to Pearl Harbor is kind of -- not? Everybody laughs at the stupidity.
Kim never felt comfortable with the Red Sox. There was a lot going on: he hurt his throwing arm; he wanted to be a starter and everybody else wanted him to be a reliever; except for his translator (also a trainer on the regular staff) he didn't have a lot in the way of friends; he differed in rehab philosophy from the conventional wisdom. Kim sucked on the mound a lot, after his injury. He never put it back together here. But -- he got traded at last in March 2005, to Colorado. They made him a starter. Considering it's Colorado, where ERAs are always higher, Kim hasn't done that badly. Certainly, he's done better there than he did at all in Fenway in 2004.
*
Baseball used to be a game of the poor: the urban poor, who played it in alleys, and the rural poor, who played out in the fields. It was a workingman's game, manual labor. Not many players went to college, and those who did were sometimes laughed at in the clubhouse. Baseball's not that game any more. Not all players go to college, now, but probably half of them do, and of those many graduate despite being eligible for the professional draft after their junior years. And as conditioning, equipment, and coaching become more and more important in players' lives, fewer and fewer American baseball players actually come from poor backgrounds. Most are upper-middle class, the kind whose parents build them pitching mounds in their back yards and have them on traveling baseball teams and sometimes even move to Florida or southern California to get better competition for Junior's development.
Where are the natural athletes in all this? Those guys who play with sticks because they can't afford bats and hit like killers anyway? Those guys who are such naturals that they don't need the best bat, best glove, personal trainer? A lot of them don't end up in baseball, because the paydays in baseball are geared toward longevity. After your initial signing bonus (which depends on how high you were drafted), you'll make as little as $5000 a year in the minor leagues, for several years, and even when you do crack the majors they don't have to pay you any more than $300,000 your first year. If it takes you five years to get to the majors, which isn't terribly uncommon, you're not exactly rolling in the dough.
Basketball can take a teenager and instantly pay him millions and have him in the starting five, if he's good enough.
*
Boston has a crappy history of race-relations, when it comes to baseball. The Red Sox were bad enough on the matter that people tar the whole city with that brush, forgetting how race-forward the Celtics were in the 1950s. The Red Sox were pretty bad, as a team overall, but they sucked at signing black players: they had an opportunity to sign Willie Mays, before anybody in baseball had heard of him, and wouldn't consider it. They were the last major league team to hire a black player, and he was a marginal guy called Pumpsie Green. As late as the 1970s, racial slurs were being said, in the hearing of reporters, by management (although by then everyone had learned to deny it). I don't know how much you can blame the city for this bad legacy and how much you can blame the owner, Tom Yawkey, who ran the team for decades like his own personal golfing party and not particularly as a team for winning.
Like most golfing parties, everybody involved tended to be white.
*
Roberto Clemente gets a lot of credit as one of the first Hispanic players to get a lot of fandom behind him. Although early commentators called him "Bob" (as they called Orestes Miñoso "Minnie Minoso"), and reported his speech complete with phonetic spelling, he gained a reputation as a good and thoughtful and outspoken guy. That he managed to die, while bringing relief to earthquake-stricken Central Americans, just helps cement his sainthood.
Thirty years later, one still gets the whiff that Hispanic players whose English is good are treated in the press better than those whose English is poor. Why put somebody up at the press table who will stammer? It's embarrassing to watch somebody fumble for a word, or shortcut his elocution because he can't translate the thought into English. (The union officially allows any player to answer press questions in any language they choose, and ask for a translator, but it almost never happens.) Those players become effectively silent, reciting the standard cliches but unable to put a personal -- human -- face on their triumphs and failures alike. It is that personal spin, the charisma and ease and turns of phrase and accepting of blame, that makes an ordinary player into "the face of the franchise."
The Hispanic players sometimes turn it around on the press. You'll see it at major events, like after the World Series, when attention requires that the whole event be shown rather than cutting away from the boring parts. There's Manny Ramirez up at the table, answering questions, and somebody from the Spanish language press asks him something in Spanish. He replies in Spanish, and offers no translation, and in the background you can hear reporters mumbling, "What? What did he say?"
*
Tony Gwynn is pretty universally regarded as one of the awesomer hitters of the 1980s. He's a big guy, fat throughout his career, cheeks like slabs and a big belly and thighs narrowing down to scrawny calves. He spent his whole career in San Diego, although he could have gotten more money elsewhere. He just liked San Diego.
He's a black man, by the way. He went to college and speaks elegantly, and has a high, fluting voice -- a little amusing in contrast with his gigantic body. When people talk about him, they say he talks like a white guy.
*
The Red Sox have taken awkward pains to make sure there's at least one black man on the major league roster, these past few years. Not an Hispanic black man, of which quite a few, but a non-Hispanic American-born black man. It's not terribly easy, any more: the percentage of black players used to be higher, and has declined to something much closer to the slice of pie black people actually occupy in the US population: 10-12%. There are still black players, from zillionaire superstars (Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield) to lesser-talent backup guys (Willie Harris, Jay Payton). There just aren't a lot of them, compared to the heyday, and nobody's really sure why. Everybody's got a theory:
* Basketball requires less equipment, less space, and fewer players, and holds out the chance of the big bucks immediately after high school.
* Football is sexier, what with the weekly titanic television contests.
* Other sports are much easier and faster to master.
* Baseball is a little boring, having no timeclock. It's hard to win people over to it, if they didn't grow up fans.
* As baseball has gotten more marginal in comparison to other sports, it has emphasized its traditional aspects more strongly. This is crappy advertising to people who are, e.g., into rap and floppy pants.
MLB's big idea is to sponsor baseball academies in inner cities, encourage poor black kids to take up this sport instead of the others. It works in the Dominican Republic, after all.
*
The Dominican Republic is a country with a huge underclass of urban and rural poor. Major league players often tell of playing with cardboard for gloves, balls made of paper and tape, weedy lots or alleys as their playing ground. Foreign players are allowed to sign free-agent contracts as young as 16, and kids do all the time. Most of them don't even make it to the US minor leagues, washing out in the Dominican academies or ending up in Mexican or Venezuelan leagues. A lucky few sock away that contract money and soldier their way through years in the US minors and stick with a major league club and find the right combination of factors and keep their health and end up as David Ortiz.
Until the last few years, kids were successfully forging birth certificates and signing at 15, 14 -- anything to get out.
Foreign academies have a bad reputation, thanks to years of training the body without taking any account for the intellect or social-psychological needs of the players. It's the job of an academy -- as with the minor leagues -- to chew up the players who won't make it and spit them out, while grooming the players who might make it for the next level. Kids get hopped up on disallowed performance-enhancing drugs, or nurse injuries in secret rather than get treatment, or get neglected in favor of somebody flashier. Kids make it to the US without having finished the equivalent of high school, and are dropped into minor league towns: Toledo, Nashville, Staten Island, Trenton.
Everyone's aware of the problem, and is slowly trying to make it better. Academies started teaching classes about how to handle a checking account, how to withhold taxes, how to rent an apartment. English classes are a big part of the system, now.
In theory, at least, it's getting better. The kids sign anyway, now as then -- anything to get out. David Ortiz comes home part of the year, plays winter ball in his old home town, and everybody thinks -- I could be the one who beats the odds, just like him.