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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
ESPN: Jeff Pearlman - Mets Fans, Minaya and Latino Ballplayers
Minaya is, without question, the organization’s best general manager since Frank Cashen.
Yet, despite the on-field success, an increasing number of Mets fans are griping about their team’s continued (and apparently all-encompassing) determination to bring in as many Latin-American ballplayers as possible. Nearly five years ago, when Jose Reyes debuted as New York’s spark plug of the future, fans were excited. When, nearly three years ago, the Mets added Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez, fans were elated. When, however, Minaya added Perez and Chavez and Valentin and Ambiorix Burgos and Orlando Hernandez and Eli Marrero and Julio Franco and Ricky Ledee and Jose Lima and Sandy Alomar Jr. and Jorge Julio and Duaner Sanchez and Geremi Gonzalez and Miguel Cairo and Jorge Sosa and Ramon Castro and Luis Castillo and Jose Offerman and Carlos Delgado and Ruben Gotay and Guillermo Mota and Moises Alou and ... well, the bloom is off the rose.
Wrote one blogger: “I’ve been a Mets fan since I saw them win in ‘69 and I have to say, I’ve never seen such blatant racism in baseball in the last 40 years.”
Wrote another: “Minaya needs to be careful about signing too many Latino players. He has to make sure that he is not overdoing it. Latin players are great, but he does show a tendency to give too many of them chances at the expense of white players and black players.”
For the record, I do not believe such sentiment to be true. Minaya is, first and foremost, a man who craves victory. He was as crushed by the Mets’ recent meltdown as any player or coach in the New York clubhouse. Plus, the Mets were second in the NL in attendance in 2007—clearly there are plenty of fans who just want a good team.
Furthermore, Minaya has repeatedly insisted that ethnicity has zero to do with the makeup of his roster. (And I believe him.) “When you are a first, there will be some people that are uncomfortable with the fact that you are a first, and they will try to create non-baseball issues if they have the opportunity,” Minaya told the Sacramento Bee last year. “I just see that as people that are uncomfortable with the fact that there’s a Hispanic in a position of authority.”
Yet oftentimes perception is stronger than reality. And in New York City, the perception of a Mets’ Latino bias is strong. Really strong.
Pearlman making sense? Stop the press.
BeanoCook
Posted: December 11, 2007 at 09:54 PM | 43 comment(s)
Related News: General, Special Topics, NY Mets
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“When you are a first, there will be some people that are uncomfortable with the fact that you are a first, and they will try to create non-baseball issues if they have the opportunity,” Minaya told the Sacramento Bee last year. “I just see that as people that are uncomfortable with the fact that there’s a Hispanic in a position of authority.”
This is really an excellent and intelligent point in my mind.
1. Throughout Mets history, fan favorites have ranged
from white (Tom Seaver) to black (Dwight Gooden) to
Latino (Jose Reyes).
Even Jose's chant, which was fan-inspired before the
PA began playing along, is akin to a soccer chant- and
what's less "American" than soccer? The common
denominator has always been the excellence or
exuberance of a player. White fans didn't identify
with Kevin McReynolds, after all.
2. A seriously large portion of the Mets fan base is
Latino- and it isn't as if these fans, and who they
relate to, should be discounted. But ask Cowbellman
who his favorite Mets are, and
near the top of the list is, yes, Mike Piazza.
3. The future will be no different. Mets fans just
last week expressed rage over a black player (Lastings
Milledge) being traded for two white players. Did
Minaya think Church and Schneider were Latin? The
media's coverage of Milledge certainly didn't allow
anyone to think he wasn't black.
Mets fans will embrace an all-Latin team in 2008,
provided they get a better result. If the team is 100%
white? Same. The only thing they won't stand for is
another collapse.
That dreadful 71-79 team could have won 83 games if they had played the remaining 12 on their schedule.
So Omar doesn't trust Alberto Gonzalez (the former Attorney General, not the former Dbacks prospect) either. And we all know Omar was right to distrust him.
Competent people come in all shapes and forms and races. So do incompetent people. I have no problem with Omar getting Latino players, as long as they suck.
Of course, fans wil root for the better team. But it is also fair to say that given the choice between a majority Latin team and an equally good majority-White team, white people are going to choose the latter. The opposite would be true for Latinos. It's in-group bias and that's pretty much a universal phenomenon.
I'm going to choose the more exciting players to watch. Equal number of wins, David Eckstein or Jose Reyes- I'm going to prefer watching Jose Reyes play. And I'm writing a book on Jewish players, but preferred watching Lastings Milledge to Shawn Green. Maybe most others feel differently. Not me.
Omar strikes a blow for black-white race relations. ... What? You mean that concern for black players wasn't sincere?
I agree with this. I always preferred the more exciting (entertaining) player, thus my bias in favor of black QB over a white QB in college. The black QB in college is much more exciting, as typically they were QBs asked to run and make plays. Of course we had Eric Crouch and now we have Tim Tebow, so it is not exclusively a black/white thing. But you get my point, in that I don't desire to watch white over black or Latin, if all things are equal, that is not true.
Finally, the NFL is worthless to me in that they try to teach athletic QBs to sit still, boring.
As for his bad deals, Church and Schneider were white. Adkins is white and Johnson is black. Lindstrom and Owens were white players traded for the latino Vargas. Flores, the latino was lost by accident. Mota was latino, Schoenweis was white.
It doesn't seem like this has hurt the club at all.
Shea Stadium cheers Jose because he's good; shea booed Mota because he's bad. Latin has nothing to do with it.
It is disingenuous for Pearlman to insinuate otherwise, since he's apparently a fan and goes to Shea fairly often. Just because he made Rocker famous doesn't mean he can make everybody else to be Rocker.
Excellent comment. I did get the feeling that Pearlman's story was indeed a "non-starter". I got the impression that he wants this racism to be so, which will give him the opportunity to rip it and stand tall on a moral high ground and he can once again bask in his omnipresence.
Gonna have to disagree here...Kevin McReynolds, Mackey Sasser, and Tim Teufel were my big three and made me who I am today- an excruciatingly boring person.
Primer's definitely slipping.
To be fair, Omar did make that comment last year when we were mostly saying :" In Omar we Trust" rather than "Omar is stupid because he traded Milledge for Church and Schneider."
Sorry, but I don't agree. I think he is right that there is a significant segment of the Mets' fan base that takes this view of Omar Minaya's decisions -- that sees them as influenced by the ethnic identities of the players involved, and that many of the decisions have (as a result) been ill-advised. I don't think it makes sense to ignore this phenomenon just because it makes us uncomfortable. Indeed, I think it will play an important (though subsidiary to the 2007 collapse) role in the way the fan base responds to this team as the 2008 season unfolds. Sure, the fans will respond principally to how a player does, but this isn't about the fans' response to the players, either individually or collectively. It's about their perception of Minaya -- and many of them believe he bases his decisions on acquiring Latino players.
By the way, I bet the Mets aren't ignoring this. I bet you they've done surveys on this, and know to a pretty high degree of precision the extent to which their fan base perceives Minaya in the way Pearlman describes. If I'm right about that, and the Mets don't ignore the way their fans feel, why should we?
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I have to say that all I see is that you like the black guys because they run.
In the last several years, I've seen people at Shea boo KazMat, Newhan, Jorge Julio. I've even heard "retire already!" shouted at Piazza during his last year here. Whether it was Anderson Hernandez or Chris Woodward tapping weakly to second, the groan was the same. I don't see any bias in the stadium.
Granted there are talks on the internet comment sections and talk radio about Omar and Latins. But when do we ever look to those sources for intelligent commentary? And how do we know what proportion of fans in reality those comments represent? On the other side, last year or 2006 there were clamours to bring back Fonzie to play second, which was equally stupid.
Also, if Pearlman really wants to talk about bigotry, he should talk to his colleague Bill "the NHL Lou Dobbs" Simmons first. If he doesn't have the balls to do that, then get off the back of fellow Mets fans.
Are you serious? Then you are trying much too hard.
I think you are trying to find racism where it doesn't exist, and if you find it, you will be pleased you found it--in a hand wringing kind of way. Kind of what I feel Pearlman tried to do and exactly what my main point was about, you don't have to root for players that match your color because of some kind of innate instinct.
We don't look to these sources for "intelligent commentary." But we can still engage in thoughtful conversation about what we hear and see in these fora, at least when what we observe there suggests things that are worth talking about. And in this instance, I think the prevalence of racism among a significant portion of the Mets' fan base is something worth talking about. It's there, it's real. Why ignore it?
And how do we know what proportion of fans in reality those comments represent?
We don't. That's a fair observation. But granting that it's somewhat speculative, do you really think it's a tiny minority? I don't. I think a lot of fans out there make an easy assumption about Minaya -- attributing racial/ethnic identity and his actions as GM to that identity (rather than simply because he thinks they were good decisions). This is hardly uncommon in this society; race itself is attributed to minority group members (but usually not to whites -- whose ethnicity is relatively invisible and hence not deemed significant to their decisions), and noticed about them. Minaya's Hispanic identity is something we "notice" about him -- and talk about -- much more readily than, for instance, the fact that Billy Beane is white. When was the last time a white GM's race even came up??? In this society, once we notice race/ethnicity, we attribute significance to it. Many Mets' fans attribute significance to the thing they notice about Omar Minaya -- and they link his ethnicity to his decisions. I would be shocked if this didn't color (no pun intended) the perception of the moves he makes.
I'm a white guy from Texas. Liberal though I may be, I have yet to be accused of looking for racism where it doesn't exist. Nor does it "please" me to find it. It saddens me. And I would note that you don't offer a whit of explanation, just an accusation of "you look for racism", which does a lot to confirm my previous opinion that you're a troll that need not be fed.
A couple of months ago, when Beane was accused of racism by Milton Bradley and some "journalist".
Fair enough -- but it took a story focused explicitly on race to place the spotlight on Beane's race. Minaya's ethnicity, by contrast, comes up all the time, virtually whenever the Mets acquire a Latino player. How many white players has Beane (or for that matter, any and all white GMs) acquired over the years without anyone stopping to think for even a split instant that it might have been influenced by the race of the GM and a "program" or even a general preference for white players?
I'm the troll? This comment ^ is an absurd extrapolation of my post in #10.
If you want a more detailed explaination from me, or if you are the least bit concerned about race, then start by growing up and asking a direct question like an adult. Don't say things I didn't say or sweeping characterizations I didn't make.
There was nothing intentional in the black QBs comment. It merely illustrates how--for better or for worse--black QBs face stereotyping on the basis of their race.
Finally, let's remember what principles we've learned from sabermetrics--picking out "random" examples of a white player I hated or a time some black guy was liked says pretty much nothing except for that I WANT to demonstrate an absence of racism. Racism is not and has never been people of color getting screwed 100% of the time and ethnic majority folks favored 100% of the time.
Whether we call it "racism" or not (and I acknowledge that we all have different definitions), our only question is "Do we have equality?"
And if you read what I said, you could note that I didn't say it was racist, nor did I call him racist for saying it.
There was some Moneyball backlash about how Beane, James, and company were systematically underrating non-whites. There was the infamous "White Jays" article about Ricciardi, and someone in the Bay Area wrote one about the A's. Neyer had a good article on it.
I'm not in favor of ignoring significant issues. But I simply don't think because a few posts make use of the fact that the Mets employ Latinos, that it means any significant portion of the fan base feels strongly about it.
My issue with the piece is taking that small group, which I'd bet is an extremely narrow minority, and extrapolating it onto all Mets fans.
Did you think I was making an argument that racism doesn't exist in baseball? If so, why?
My issue with the piece is taking that small group, which I'd bet is an extremely narrow minority, and extrapolating it onto all Mets fans.
My experience with white Mets fans is that they joke about Minaya signing Latinos but don't single out any of the Latino guys that they don't like. Then, of course, in September, they hated all of the Mets no matter what they're color. Also, the Milledge trade has created a lot of discontent. If the Wilpon's forced the trade because they were worried about image, they made a big mistake. I think Milledge's energy and brashness would have played very well in NYC.
No, I thought you were just demonstrating that racism is not monodirectional. However there's been enough of the "there was this one white guy once..." thinking in the thread that even though I thought your point was to demonstrate that, I wanted to remind people that "It happens to everyone, therefore we should ignore it" is a fallacial argument.
I like the LSU setup, where they actually bring in Perriloux (black QB) on running plays and throw way more often with Whatshisface (white QB).
now we have Tim Tebow,
Yeah, those 2-5 yard touchdown runs are really exciting.
Chase Daniels can move a little bit too. But Pat White (of course, based on your handle, you probably don't like him because he's from the Big East) and Dennis Dixon were the most exciting College QBs in the game and they basically are the black QB stereotype.
No, I was just pointing out that it had happened to Beane before.
Should I list my liberal credentials?
Well, there was this. And this. And this.
(Disclaimer: "It happens to everyone, therefore we should ignore it" is a fallacial argument.)
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