Murray Chass: HONORING BUT BETRAYING ROBINSON and DUNCANS’ DREADFUL DEVELOPMENTS

[Jackie] Robinson deserves to be remembered for what he did, but he would not be impressed with MLB’s hiring record in recent years. On the contrary, he’d be disappointed, if not disgusted. If MLB has a minority hiring program, it hasn’t made an impact in recent years.

Since the Philadelphia Phillies named Ruben Amaro Jr. general manager Nov. 3, 2008, teams have hired 14 general managers. All have been white. Of the last 23 managers hired, dating to May 2010, three have been minorities, and one of them, Ozzie Guillen, no longer has his job. Heading into the 2013 season, MLB has only one minority general manager, Amaro, and four minority managers – three African Americans and a Latino.

This is the worst story I have heard in years. It’s a terrible tale of one family, a baseball family, as it happens, but it’s not the baseball aspect of it that matters. No family of any kind should have to experience it.

Dave Duncan, one of the great pitching coaches in baseball history, was forced to relinquish his position with the St. Louis Cardinals under manager Tony La Russa when his wife, Jeanine, was diagnosed in 2011 with a brain tumor.

The tumor was a glioblastoma, as deadly as any that has been found. I wrote about it last week in a column about Michael Weiner, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who was diagnosed with a glioblastoma last August.

But Jeanine Duncan was not to be the only member of the Duncan family so afflicted. Last October, 14 months after his mother was diagnosed, Chris, one of the Duncans’ two major league sons, was also found to have a glioblastoma, MLB.com reported. The only difference, Dave Duncan said in a telephone call, is his wife’s tumor is grade 4, his son’s grade 2, the higher number being worse.