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1. Who Swished In Your Cornflakes? Posted: December 17, 2006 at 02:52 AM (#2263484)Hasn't the Chinese market been considered the "biggest prize of all," no matter the industry? The automakers want to sell in China, purveyors of consumer goods want to sell in China, etc. S
o, why is this idiot getting all paranoid over an obvious economic fact?
Oh, sorry. Can't We Put ThAT to beD onCe and FOR ALL anD Try to Focus Instead?!?!? On Their -- "AchievEMents" -- in ClassiCAL MUSIc and the Hard Sciences?
That should be "So," not "o." I can't bring myself to get worked up enough over this topic to let loose with an anguished "Oh!"
Nope. I read it thrice. He said that.
Jesus.
This article - like all the others I've read on that site - is pure crackpottery.
Can Vince Young Become the New Black Savior
Discover THIS Dicovery Channel's 27 Member Cycling Team For Tour De France Has...No African Americans
Is There A Secret Message Lebron James' Baseball Cap
Sign Of Hope Black MLB Reliever Tom Gordon Much In Demand
WILLIE RANDOLPH'S CHALLENGE CAN WILLIE RUN WILD
Who is this guy? Bill Gates?
They're wiping their asses at BASN with $100 bills. You know, after pulling articles out of them.
No. That title belongs to Amare (Black Jesus) Stoudemire.
It's a stupid article, but did I just read right or did someone here argue that the destruction of one of the most vibrant African American owned industries in order to make money for a racially exclusive MLB ownership was not bad for African Americans in any way?
The quoted section is absolute true. Seriously, pick any series of words in there and please explain what is wrong with it. The author even said, "Yes it benefited lots of Black players although far more lost their profession and their livelihood."
It's the same as Brown v. Board and the integration of schools. Sure, we can all agree that government enforced segregation is bad, and integration is something we should do, but if the implementation is to throw all of the African American school teachers out on their asses because the white parents don't want their kids taught by black teachers, and the long-term trend is a return to virtual segregation, I think we can all agree that we let the wrong people make all the decisions of HOW to integrate.
I'm sure some jackass is going to come on and make some personal attacks about how I'm some crazy radical colored person who sees racism everywhere, but these are actual issues I'm interested in so I'd love to have a nice discussion on the issue that I can learn some from. Seriously, just address the actual issues at hand and prove me wrong, it'll be fun!
Or we can just be like, "The article writer believes in race theory and can't form paragraphs! I know some other black guy I think is an idiot, it'd be really clever to equate the two!"
The issues brought up are good and we don't discuss them nearly enough. Let's demonstrate our intelligence by getting something out of it...
Oh, the arguments are fine - taken separately. But it's ludicrous to say "MLB was racist for its color bar," then turn around and declare "MLB ruined the Negro Leagues by taking all the talent." One or the other.
If the Negro League's culture meant so much, then the stakeholders should've turned down MLB's offerings, right? But if competing in the white man's game was of paramount importance, then the Negro Leagues should be looked at the same as "colored" drinking fountains - a relic from a regrettable era.
Allowing an oppressed minority group to compete at the highest level of any endeavour has implications far beyond the actual participants. That's not to say there was no harm, just that there was greater good.
Oh, and what Robot Boy said.
I was the one who originally brought up the passage without quoting it. Yes, the integration of MLB was bad for the Negro Leagues, but so what? The only way the Negro Leagues could have survived would have been if Major League Baseball had never integrated. It is that simple. Yes, the balck owners of the Negro League teams lost out on the deal, but businesses go out of business every day for much worse reasons than the end of racial segregation in a major sports league. The integration of baseball was bad for the Negro Leagues, the Negro League players too old or not good enough to play in the majors and, I suppose, baseball fans who enjoyed attending Negro League games and couldn't afford or did not live close enough to a MLB city to go to MLB games - not for African Americans, unless you want to equate the two. Also, MLB's goal was not "the destruction of one of the most vibrant African American owned industries," it was to get the best ballplayers into the show. They did so by ceasing to be "racially exclusive," and, yeah, they made money of the deal. It's a business.
I'm not knocking the Negro Leagues. They were an incredibly important and wonderful part of baseball history, but one that only existed because of institutional racism; which - happily - ended, making them obsolete.
In the two examples above, it's possible to acknowledge the ultimate good of the major shift while also noting the fact that the evil that we were trying to thwart still fundamentally guided the implementation.
The "people lose businesses everyday" is a particularly ineffective explanation when you consider the historical rarity of a black owned business group. I mean, it's analagous to saying, "Well people lose farms everyday" as a response to the WWII concentration camp land grab of American citizens' land, citizens who not coincidentally happened to be of Japanese ancestry.
Businesses go out of business every day for much worse reasons than the end of racial segregation in a major sports league, like say a bunch of the ethnic majority business ownership ignoring their own policies of player subjugation in order to destroy the businesses of a minority group. Once again, I'm not seeking to minimizing the good of integration, only to view it from all perspectives.
Furthermore, the integration was certainly positively in favor of the owners' self-interests. That's where the article is on point--the desire for money producing talent eventually outweighed the racist framework.
It's fun to romanticize in historical hindsight, but I think if you really want to judge the motives of integration you only need to look at the level of respect MLB management treated the league they were cannibalizing.
This is where I'd like to split from the article and note what is different. At least now MLB owners are honoring the commitments and rules of NPB. Whether they are doing it out of a believe in racial/national equity or just because the NPB is strong enough to demand negotiation is really up to you to evaluate.
I would agree entirely, but I don't think this is a automatic determination. In any case, you would have to weigh the outcomes and evaluate. You can certainly think of an implementation of integration to a system in which there was not greater good, right?
And China's baseball development is still so far from Japan/Korea/China right now it's not even funny. let's just put it this way, on the China national team there might be 2 players that might be able to play in Taiwan's CPBL, which is the weakest league of the 3. and the CPBL only has 1 player who was even close to the MLB in former Dodger prospect Chen Chin Feng.
Let me tell you, if the Supreme Court rules against the school boards in the two cases they've got dealing with racial quotas in public schools then there's a decent chance there will be a lot more places that will go back to having segregated schools and that would be a disaster for long-term race relations in this country
Mad props for Scoop Jackson reference.
How cool would it have been for the MLB to have merged with the Negro Leagues, with some of the best Negro League teams switching into MLB. Instead of the expansion Devil Rays, Diamondbacks, Rockies and Marlins, we could have had the Greys, Crawfords, Monarchs, and American Giants. Certainly there have been precedents - the NFL-AFL merger, and even the AL-NL merger.
Obviously, that would have presupposed a willingness of MLB owners to associate with owners of Negro Leagues teams on an equal basis. Let's assume that a league that still has no black ownership wouldn't have done that. Certainly the goal of the MLB owners wasn't to destroy the Negro Leagues - it was a side-effect (unlike, for example, Japanese internment policy), but MLB ownership certainly took no equitable position toward Negro League teams.
I believe we can still honor Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey for being courageous individuals, regardless.
Oh, come on. That would be like the NL absorbing the Eastern league, racism would have nothing to do with St. Louis being unwilling to accept Akron as an equal.
Oops, that's the buzzer, I have to get this shortbread out of the oven...
Obviously some kind of merger would have required the movement of some teams (the Denver Monarchs?), and the dissolving of others, but Eraser-X is right - the Negro Leagues generated a lot of Hall members. Why not a merger? Well, mid-20th century racism for one. Talent probably wasn't the reason why it didn't happen.
would Like to Be
taken seriously They should
Learn to write Correctly.
This site looks like most of my students' term papers.
would Like to Be
taken seriously They should
Learn to write Correctly.
This site looks like most of my students' term papers.
Jesus, I didn't know the grading process extended to Primer as well . . .
Kinda reminds me of this:
"That's not writing--that's typing."
-- Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac's method of composition for On the Road
I think a fair argument can be made that it is a net negative to have the best Japanese players coming over to play in MLB. It's pretty obvious that the chance to play in the US majors is good for the Japanese stars who come over here. But it also hurts Japanese baseball, though by how much I don't know.
If it hurts the popularity of baseball in Japan more than it helps MLB, then perhaps it is a net negative. I've heard some commentators, including Bobby Valentine, say that pro baseball has been falling in popularity in Japan since their stars have been fleeing. Maybe there are other reasons (I don't know). But it seems to me that it would be a shame if baseball declined so much in Japan that it eventually was no longer a popular sport there.
With regard to African American players, those with talent are free to pursue baseball, if that is their interest. It seems like too few talented black American athletes are interested. Nonetheless, MLB would be wise to encourage interest, to build quality facilities in black neighborhoods, and even to develop baseball academies where poor, but talented American kids (who perhaps lack the resources to develop their skills) can play regularly. There are so many academies in Latin America -- why not more in the U.S.?
There's no real direct competition. No Japanese satellite or cable channel is going to turn down NPB in favor of MLB, and there's no need, either. And, I don't want to burst any bubbles, but most Japanese fans don't follow any MLB team, they follow Japanese players in MLB.
The fact is, Japanese baseball still has foreign player limits. This is because the powers that be feel, probably rightly, that Japanese fans aren't interested in a league with mostly foreigners and a few Japanese players. Personally, I think doing away with the limits would help raise the level of the league and entice more Japanese players to stay, but it can't be argued that the Japanese fan base is extremely Japanese-centric.
There's a lot of gloom and doom, but IMO most of it is overstated. The threat of wide spread player drain will shake the Japanese owners out of their complacency, cause the some changes, but the fate of the Negro Leagues is not that of NPB. Not until travel becomes much more convenient.
the cynical answer is because latin america players are free to sign with anyone, anyone in the united states that is developed by these academies are more likely to enter into the draft, so for something like this to work, the academies would have to be funded by mlb, not individual teams.
It may be true, but in a way it's similar to what MLB was doing in the segregation era - fans didn't want to see black ballplayers on their white teams. The result was an MLB that deliberately chose to not benefit from the talents of Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and Josh Gibson. Taiwan and South Korea both have well-developed baseball leagues - instead of benefitting fully from an infusion of talent from other Asian countries (to say nothing of the U.S. or Latin America), NPB seems intent on repeating the mistakes MLB made decades ago. The popularity of Bobby Valentine and other foreign-born contributors to NPB suggests that Japanese fans might take interest in a hometown baseball team that has talent, regardless of the nationality of the player. Who knows - maybe a few popular Korean or Chinese players in NBP will help world peace break out.
It's a stupid article, but did I just read right or did someone here argue that the destruction of one of the most vibrant African American owned industries in order to make money for a racially exclusive MLB ownership was not bad for African Americans in any way?
I'm sure it was. I'm also sure that some Liverpudlians were worse off after the Beatles left for the US.
I don't know at what date one would place the beginning full plundering of Latin America and Japan and their "cheap labor". At whatever date is reasonably chosen, the plundering has coincided with a steady rise, not decline, in the salaries of all players. "Coincided" is a key word in the prior sentence, but the trend in players salaries isn't exactly a textbook example of the plundering of cheap labor.
And I'm sure most Americans were worse off when McCartney came to the US...:)
It may be true, but in a way it's similar to what MLB was doing in the segregation era - fans didn't want to see black ballplayers on their white teams.
IIRC, there were more than a few surveys taken of fans during the late 1930's and early 1940's that were contrary to this, and innumerable star players of the time were also quoted as saying that black players should be given a chance to play in the Majors. The biggest hangups were (1) the racism of many specific owners; (2) general inertia, as in "it's always been this way, and we're doing well" (which Rickey and Veeck saw right through, to their great benefit); (3) the racism of fans in some of the border cities of the Majors (St. Louis) and throughout the minors; (4) the perceived (and very real) problems of travel in an era of segregated public accommodation throughout the border states and even much of the North; and (5) the bitter resistance of some (even if not a majority) of the players, especially those on the margins who feared competition for jobs. But the problem was not acceptance of black players by the fans or players in general.
As has been said above in the travel and time zone post (a nice one by CFiJ, by the way), I don't think Japanese baseball is necessarily hurt by the defection of its stars. Japanese baseball fans have already dealt with the fact that their sport does not include the world's best; their turnout is not dependent on that. They watch the games because of the games. An overall decline in the level of play may indeed have a popularity effect, but I think that needs to be proven.
We are looking at potential equitable solutions, to just say, "It would not have worked!" is to internalize the racial inequities of the time.
If you want a simple solution to your problem, they could have merged the multiple teams in the geographic area and just given a proportional stake in the new franchise equivalent to the number of players used.
The Twins response to the Matsuzaka insanity is to just look further across the globe.
That's not the cynical answer, it's the correct one. And I'm pretty sure the author knows it as well but just wanted to throw out the rhetorical as an inflamatory grenade, like a comedian throwing out a rhetorical "What's the deal with hospital food..." for a cheap laugh.
Yeah, because the biggest problem in the inner city is that not enough kids are pursuing becoming professional athletes. Far too many kids wasting there times become computer technical support, plumbers, accountants, "frivolous" crap like that.
This has been a recording.
I think that's a really unfair thing to say ... I'm 100% positive that David's ideal equitable situation, as would everyone's posting here, would have been for baseball to be integrated from the start. Rascism is obviously a hugely touchy subject, particularly to people who are affected by it on either side of the coin, but accusing people of internalizing racial inequities (i.e. being or accepting racism) for making a business-related point over the merger of two profit-oriented businesses is a bit much ... there's no reason he or anyone is required to theorize a merger between MLB and the Negro Leagues purely as an issue of race. The Negro Leagues are a fascinating, awesome, and necessary part of baseball and US history (as were the women's leagues). I wish I could have gone to some of those games. But in the perfect world that I would like to live in, they never existed in the first place because all their players would have been busy playing for the Yankees, Cardinals, and Boston Braves. That seems pretty equitable to me.
And yes, Squash, of course I think that there should have been no color line in the first place. But there was obviously no way in 1947 to make a color line not have existed; we have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as it would have been if things had been done differently (or more "equitably") in the past.
Donald Rumsfeld: "As you know, you play the game in world you have. It's not the world you might want or wish to have at a later time."
The reference was to the columnist, not the deceased senator.
This is symptomatic of the problems with the responses to my post. Your criticism is toward something I never suggested. I think this is mostly my fault. I've got three people quoting the same sentence but ignoring the rest of the post which already answers the points they are raising. How is merging the leagues and selecting the best players from both, as I suggested, going to cause many, many, players who just weren't good enough to play major league baseball? How is it different from your solution that "makes much more sense" to just cull the best players?
Furthermore, that wasn't what happened. In reality, there were many, many players who were not good enough to fill out MLB rosters playing major league baseball after 1947. A few token players of African descent didn't suddenly mean that the best players were on the field.
You are still viewing it from a single perspective. The reality is that there were multiple leagues will Hall of Fame talent during the pre-integration era. This meant that many of the MLB players only have a historical record in MLB because of the segregation of superior players.
Then one league cannibalized the other with no compensation because, let's face it, because the other was weaker, not entirely, but at least in some part because they were not the ethnic majority.
A merger could have focused only on the strongest Negro League teams and teams could have relocated to any number of new cities to establish an MLB presence in that city. In 1947 there was no team west of St. Louis and no team south of St. Louis. Players could be distributed in an equitable manner to all teams in the merged MLB via a draft, or whatever.
And if they were going to move most of the Negro League teams, what kind of merger exactly would that have been?
It would have been a merger less equitable than the NL/AL merger, but more equitable than the destruction of the teams altogether.
And if you were going to move a Negro League team to an entirely new market, what would it have to offer to MLB?
Not sure what establishing baseball teams in new markets would offer to MLB. Perhaps someone should ask them. They've seemed keen on doing it for a long time now.
Certainly we're speaking in ahistorical counterfactuals, but I haven't come across your own proposed solution, David. How does one achieve MLB integration in a way that doesn't result in the wholesale destruction of all Negro Leagues teams? Or perhaps you believe that the Negro Leagues teams weren't worth saving?
(I'm not saying this was one of the reasons a merger didn't happen though; it didn't happen because the 16 owners of MLB at the time had no financial reason to consider such an action).
Why is avoiding the wholesale destruction the Negro League teams a goal for MLB, who at the heart of it was in direct competition?
The only reason Negro League owners had baseball teams worth owning were MLB's hiring practices. MLB changed its own policy, a wholy internal matter. They did nothing to the Negro League owners.
People give MLB great big chunks of money for expansion teams. You're suggesting MLB give an expansion franchise to a Negro League owner as gift because they are taking away the opportunity that they themselves created! If I let you borrow or my car I don't need to buy it back from you.
Eraser X-
If Grady Sizemore was never allowed to be promoted, and got to play a bunch of exhibition games against semi-pro teams, and nobody really wrote down his statistics... I bet in 2060 there might be some people who would say he was better than Willie Mays.
Beyond the purely financial reasons a merger doesn't make sense, leagues do not merge with leagues of widely different talent levels.
Without getting into the middle of this I will just say that I don't think this is true. In fact I would say that every merger between leagues has involved a significant difference in talent level. If you were to look at them all I would surmise that the difference between the Negro Leagues and MLB would be no greater than the mergers that drove the expansion of all three other major sports.
I'm not familiar, I concede, with the finances of the individual Negro League teams in the late 1940s, so I don't know which ones were the "strongest" Negro League teams at that time. Please enlighten me if you know. But it looks to me like only two Negro League teams served markets that MLB wasn't already serving and would have wanted at the time: Baltimore and Kansas City. (As evidenced by the fact that MLB chose to serve these markets relatively soon after.) All other Negro League teams were either in already-served markets (NY, Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago) or ones MLB didn't want (Indy, Birmingham, Memphis).This is a definition of "equitable" with which I'm not familiar. It seems to me that you mean "equal," not "equitable" -- but the leagues weren't equal, so an equal merger wouldn't have made much sense. And "equitable" for whom? (Can I point out here that what you're actually advocating is to screw many black players in exchange for helping a couple of black owners?)Not in 1947 they weren't. They didn't open a new market until 1953 -- and most of the team movement of the 1950s involved moving weaker teams as much as it did opening new markets -- and they weren't interested in expanding the league at all, for any owners, black or white. And you're missing the point of my question: I'm asking specifically why "Move a Negro League team there" is the best <u>business</u> answer to the question, "How can we serve new markets?"
If they had been interested in expanding at the time, perhaps it would have made sense to add the Monarchs and Elite Giants. (But again, I'm not aware of these team's finances.) But given that they weren't, why would they prefer to keep the Browns and As in horrid situations and add two Negro League teams instead of what they actually did? And if MLB decided to expand even more, what did (say) the Homestead Grays' ownership offer, financially, outside of Pittsburgh, that an established local business community didn't/wouldn't? (Start with expansion fees.)I'm not trying for a "solution." I'm trying to analyze what made sense, businesswise, for MLB.
Having spent some time thinking it over while participating in this thread, actually, I doubt that there's anything that could have been done in the late 1940s, in the effectively pre-aviation era. By the time far-flung markets (and hence significant expansion) became reasonable options logistically, the Negro Leagues were gone.
So, no, as a purely business proposition, I don't think the Negro Leagues were worth saving.
(I was initially going to suggest that perhaps they could have been saved as a minor league -- but you run into the same problem of team location. Most of the league was in major league markets, not minor league ones, and I'm sure that there were established minor league teams already in the other markets. There was no call for extra minor league teams, and indeed, over the next decade or so, the minors significantly contracted.)
NPB:
"Hey, we're just like the US army: Don't ask, don't tell. Except we're talking about you know, the people, you know, the angry guys that like Kimchee... we may have said too much."
Which doesn't do any of the things you said it would, so this difference is utterly irrelevant. The criticism might as well have been "If the teams had been merged, the Sun would have crashed into the ocean."
My earlier address of this issue:
Obviously, this is would disproportionately favor large market teams. But I'm sure you can think of myriad ways to adjust this plan if you are concerned competitive balance (which no one seemed to be at the time).
Sure, especially, if Sizemore wiped the floor with Mays in direct competition. Of course, Mays is getting slower these days...
I don't think a better solution was possible at the time. I don't think it's worth it to assign blame for these past events. I do think it's worth understanding the motivations at hand and the idea that just because "integration" is occurring that doesn't mean that positive motives are at work. Furthermore, while the net result might be positive, it's not going to be as positive as if the task had been undertaken with good intentions.
This is immensely instructive for analyzing contemporary decisions and policy. Look at Iraq--it really doesn't matter whether you believe the administration's changing justifications for the war--they clearly are not motivated or interested in accomplishing those goals, and so the implementation of the plan was a catastrophic failure.
We should be able to say, "Integration of schools is wonderful, but the execution of Brown v. Board was a catastrophe".
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