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I won't pretend to be impartial, but throwing at someone in the ninth inning of a game you are losing seems particularly bush league. And Bobby V's press conference was just bizarre.
Hard to believe the Boston players are upset with Scott for saying that. I am sure most agree with him.Does Bobby V. take direction from the drunks in the stands?
Maybe Luke could have saved himself some pain by calling the park "picturesque" and the fans "ardent".
Price didn't hit Gonzo. That was Matt Moore.
I know, I know. They all look alike to you.
It's been done before!
He threw every pitch either inside or wayyyyyyyyyy inside until he hit him, there was no attempt to mask what he was doing.
They should send Bryce Harper up there, he'd show them how we do things in the Majors when you get hit.
That's Rayscist.
This little incident, and their reactions, show how good Maddon seems to be with his players, and how lousy Bobby V is.
Wow, man. Like, cool out, bro. Why don't you "intercept" a number and Choom a bit?
Saying someone is worse than Hitler is hyperbole (note the "obvious"), calling someone a racist is calling someone a racist.
I'd say it does. Throwing at someone's head-level is more dangerous. How do you figure it's the same dangerous as any other level?
Continuing to throw at Scott seems kind of petty, but with that beard he's got to expect some stuff coming his way.
Because Scott's brain is in his ass!
(I knew someone would bite! Wheeeeee!)
Why not allow his African-American teammates to decide if he's a racist? Or is that too inconvenient?
Yeah, I bet some of his best friends....
Yeah, except David Price and B.J. Upton are well aware that Scott is a birther and yet it does not seem to bother them one iota. (If anything offends them, it is probably Scott's facial hair.) How can that be?
I'm still wondering how it could be that you're so tight with David Price and BJ Upton.
How do we know this? Seriously. Price and Upton could very well hate Scott's guts for all we know. And if they do hate his guts, we wouldn't necessarily know that it's because he's a birther. Of course, the fact that a couple of black guys hate a white guy's guts wouldn't mean that the white guy is a racist either.
And let's face it, we don't even know whether Price and Upton are aware that Scott's a birther. The stuff that some major league players are unaware of can be pretty staggering.
So now Price, a vocal Obama supporter in '08, and Upton are clueless morons, unable to read the papers or go online? And it sure seemed like the entire Rays roster had Scott's back last night.
EDIT: To be clear, I don't doubt that many birthers are racist and most are loons.
The players are going to sit quietly in a dugout and not say one word? In any event, I highly doubt that Joe Maddon has much of a threshold for racist garbage.
By the way, I'm still wondering how many birthers you have interviewed over the past four years to make you satisfied that every last one of them is a racist.
I think he'll be satisfied with winning the games and giving the Red Sox an October vacation.
No, that's not close to resembling anything I wrote.
Many professional athletes are largely unaware of the world around them, often by choice.* Whether Price or Upton (or, for that matter, their other-hued teammates) follow the news close enough to know that Luke Scott, while playing for the Orioles, outed himself as a birther is unknown to me, and, I suspect, to you (despite your suggestions of intimate knowledge of their thought processes). It would not surprise me if that were the case with either of them, not because of any trait specific to them, but because professional athletes spend far less time following, and bickering over, this #### than nimrods like us do.
* While reaching the highest level of competition may not require single-minded devotion, it may be aided by such a mindset. But I couldn't speak first-hand on that, since I'm nowhere near as accomplished as either of them.
And again, when you take into account Maddon's reputation, both in the clubhouse and community, I cannot imagine that he would have welcomed a guy thought to be a bigot.
Try sitting on the bench or in the bullpen for 162 games and spring training and talking about baseball all of the time! In my era, a broad range of topics were discussed, including sensitive ones like religion and politics.
Yeah, well that's a biased sample. Those bullpens contained at least one known nimrod. (-:
And I suspect that unlike many of us internet loudmouths, you were able to agree to disagree on certain things instead of letting political or religious differences ruin your ability to function as teammates. And I also suspect that if asked your opinion about what kind of teammate so-and-so was, you'd answer the question on the basis of things like how he went about his business and how he treated the other guys on the team instead of on whether he was a member of the John Birch Society or the Socialist Worker's Party.
It ruins your ability to want to be with them or deal with them off the field. It only goes to hell in the clubhouse or on the field if the team is losing.
I played with a Bircher (Mike Armstrong), rank anti-semites (converting to Judaism gave me an "Invisible Man" insight to bigotry - "jewing people down", player wives' looking for horns on my wife's head) and a player who started a brawl on an sirplane by calling Terry Whitfield the n-word (Ed Whitson, who was promptly attacked by Max Venable for the utterance). And I already detailed the Gene Pentz "going to hell" comment in an earlier post.
Like any pure #### in your offices, you have to do your job and try to ignore them - like SOSH's comment for example :)
But I do evaluate players on more than ability. I looked at how they treated themselves, their teammates, fans and family, as they will spend more time not playing baseball and have to deal with reality and not be some #### who used to play baseball.
Holy ####. Seriously?
C'mon, I said it with love.
Yes. While in Omaha in 1982, the wife of a former MLB player (and father of a recent player) kept staring at my wife-to-be's head when she found out that she was Jewish and muttered "but, but where are your horns?". In order to end the uncomfortable silence, she resourcefully told this woman that she had plastic surgery to remove them.
The same person also believed in the Proctor and Gamble satan worship story.
......and SOSH will not be ignored.
Even leaving aside whether or not the birther hysteria has a strongly racist tinge (pro tip: it does), has everyone forgotten about this?
Racist? Not for me to decide. But Luke Scott has said and done some pretty racist ####.
He is what he is. He has some controversial and frankly stupid political views and in general is very far to the right but there's no indication he's a racist or a bad guy. Decent people believe dumb things sometimes.
Unrelated, kind of esoteric, question: so that Omaha club had Tim Ireland on it, who got a little bit of stathead (and otherwise) traction once upon a time as a managerial candidate to watch. That was not to be and he's spent a decent amount of time as a Far East scout in recent years. Do you have any thoughts that you'd care to share on how he'd've done as a big league coach or skipper? IIRC, he was thought to have had issues with insufficient bending to the org's will, but I wouldn't know - I wasn't there and it was a long time ago.
Oh, man - I'd forgotten about the P&G story ... I remember being told that at church when I was a kid. Geez Louise.
Otherwise, uh, what 50-52 said.
From the same article (which is definitely worth reading - we had a thread on it back in the day):
Try sitting on the bench or in the bullpen for 162 games and spring training and talking about baseball all of the time! In my era, a broad range of topics were discussed, including sensitive ones like religion and politics.
I played college baseball at Duke and again on the Ellipse at the same time I was heavily involved in the civil rights movement, and trust me, I got an earful of what the other players thought about both the movement and about my participation in it. Especially in the era of ESPN and a trillion tweets, it's hard for me to imagine that Scott's teammates weren't at least marginally aware of his political views, whether or not they ever actually discussed those topics with him.
------------------------------------------------------
Even leaving aside whether or not the birther hysteria has a strongly racist tinge (pro tip: it does), has everyone forgotten about this?
That quote's impossible to decipher unless you've seen Scott and Pie interact over a course of time, or without knowing how the rest of their exchanges like that play out. If only judging people's souls were that easy.
I don't know if you can hear me all the way up there on that horse, but I simply pointed out that the words and actions in that quoted excerpt are racist. I specifically went out of my way to not call Scott a racist.
Honestly? Nope.
I'm no great fan of Valentine's, but between Maddon's trust exercises, and thinking he's baseball's version of Hannibal Lecter (Minus the whole cannibal thing...though I do wonder where Sam Fuld is)..no thank you.
And lost in all this racist ######## is...wtf Maddon? Welcome to baseball. Your guy beaned AGon because AGon 'promised to homer'. Nevermind that AGon was talking about breaking out of a slump, not 'showing anyone up' Now, you or your team may have put Moore in his place, but if you went after Moore with some soar-bars wrapped in towels, then maybe you should have informed the Red Sox. And then you hit Pedroia? #### happens Maddon.
And 'promising there will be payback'? Classless. Stop pretending your 'the computer who wore tennis shoes'. Tito would have handled the whole thing with grace.
Smyly, I wasn't trying to get on any horse. My comments were meant to be directed at quick judgments derived from reading a few random paragraphs, and I should have acknowledged your closing words. My bad, and my apologies.
But I also question whether you can say for sure that even those specific words and actions of Scott's were racist without knowing more about how he and Felix Pie interact in general.** It's easy to think about Scott's loony birther beliefs and start extrapolating from there, but I can't shake the feeling that there's a lot more to Luke Scott than his crazy-assed gun toting right wing views might seem to imply.
**60 years ago I wouldn't have had much question about that, since the power relationships between blacks and whites in clubhouses were far more lopsided, and often blacks were just expected to take it with a smile when some white clown decided to start parroting the racist crap he'd been brought up with back home, completely oblivious to how it felt to be on the receiving end. But unless I'm thoroughly mistaken, the days of such grotesquely one-sided relationships are long gone and aren't coming back, which is why I'm hesitant to draw any firm conclusions about Scott from that quoted exchange.
With two men on base already? Whether Moore wanted to hit Gonzalez or not in that game I don't know (though I'm quite sure that if he did it would have been his decision and not something the coaching staff requested) but I find it highly unlikely that he intentionally hit Gonzalez in that situation.
Oh, ########. The things you're objecting to would be endearing if he were managing the Sox. Maddon makes Bobby look like Rain Man's idiot brother.
This is also ########, by the way. Failures of mindfulness are failures of mindfulness. Almost nobody is intentionally malignant; that doesn't mean their actions aren't stupid, ill-considered and destructive.
All but confirmed. And if you watch the NESN feed, you can see Pena talking to him telling him that was a shitty point in the game to bean a guy.
I don't care if Valentine is Bobby Boucher. I don't want Maddon anywhere near my team.
As a person of color (not Felix Pie though) I found that quote incredibly offensive.
As a person of color (not Felix Pie though) I found that quote incredibly offensive.
My point is simply that "all I know is what I read in the newspapers" (or that I see in a snippet posted on a website) isn't always all there is to a story. There's context to everything, and while words are often exactly what they seem at first glance, sometimes they aren't.
As you noted, you're not Felix Pie. Is he like one of John McGraw's mascots whose head got rubbed for "luck" in a demeaning "relationship" that was the ugly byproduct of a caste system? Or are he and Scott two veteran teammates who over the course of a season try to keep things loose by talking #### to each other, with plenty of leeway allowed on both sides? Or does the truth here lie somewhere in between? That's what we don't know.
I enjoy calling people vile names just because of the color of their skin. My company only hires white people. And I like to wear a fancy white silk robe and hood at secret meetings with other people who talk and act the same way. But don't you dare call me a racist unless you know what's in my heart.
Yes.
What do I do with the other 3.9 seconds?
I don't think Moore was throwing at Gonzalez last week for the reasons Jim laid out. I think Price's retweet about hitting Gonzalez prior to that game has not gotten enough criticism but I'm not too worked up about it.
This is generic "throw at each other" BS that should die if two managers who like their names in the paper a bit too much would let it. I can understand Maddon being pissed after the game Friday, not sure why Bobby had to flap his gums last night.
Also, criticizing racist actions is something we can all do, whether we know what a person's co-workers feel about him or not.
The Rev. Al couldn't have said it any better.
Of course that's assuming that you can tell whether an action is racist by reading an edited and decontextualized account of it in a newspaper or on a website. Not everyone comes equipped with such remarkable powers of perception.
So why bend over backwards to defend Scott? Liberals don't like birthers, therefore birthers must be defended?
As other have noted, we really have no idea what Scott's teammates think of him. People are complicated. It's entirely possible that many of his teammates think he's a loon and a bit of racist, but still like him on a personal level and think he's a good teammate. That was the impression I got from Adam Jones' comments.
You may be comfortable casually labeling someone a racist or saying that they are engaging in racist behavior. I'm not.
And you may be comfortable with casually dismissing racism or racist behavior. I'm not.
You and Pamela Geller would get along just fine, Lassus. She has the same care-free attitude toward labeling people terrorists/jihadis that you have calling folks racists.
One last time: You and I have never spent time with Luke Scott, whereas David Price, an Obama supporter, shares a dugout and clubhouse with him every day and has not complained.
This reminds me of people who say that soandso is a d***head online, but a great guy in real life. That's an irrelevant distinction IMO.
I wasn't talking about Luke Scott. I was only responding to what you just wrote.
And you may be comfortable with casually dismissing racism or racist behavior. I'm not.
But then what do you say if we learn that Scott and Pie are close friends, and that the sort of banter we see in that quote was completely understood by Pie as a sort of running joke?
To me it's a bit like labeling a player a steroid user simply on the basis of his bicep size and his statistics. Those are two pieces of a puzzle that might say something more, but until you see the rest of the pieces, you shouldn't be jumping to conclusions, especially when a label of "racist" or "juicer" is so loaded with negative connotations.
In both cases what bothers me is the rush to jump to conclusions. If in fact those words of Scott's turn out to be as bad in context as they may appear to be on the surface, I doubt if there wouldn't be subsequent reports about other incidents that would lend more credence to the malignant reading of what he said to Pie. That being the case, why the rush to jump the gun? Isn't it better to presume innocence and then alter your view upon further evidence, than to accuse someone on the basis of one decontextualized story and then have to apologize later?
That sort of distinction works better when you're talking about actions that have specific racial effects, such as those of a politician who consistently votes for measures that negatively affect African Americans or Latinos. In that case there's an easy way to measure the impact of his actions.
But in this case, that "easy way" doesn't exist, because you have no idea whether that behavior of Scott's are "racist" until you know the ongoing relationship he has with Felix Pie. This point is independent of whether or not you're actually labeling Scott a racist, which you haven't.
IOW while I agree with your general point that "actions speak louder than words", you first have to know how to interpret the actions. And without knowing the nature of Scott's relationship with Pie, I don't see how you can do that.
I will wait until a teammate plays the race card on Scott, as I have little confidence in 24/7 sports media to cover a story in depth and without sensationalism.
Weasel word time! they seem fine? How do you know that? David Price wouldn't know you from a turd on the sidewalk.
I'm willing to accept Luke Scott's teammates of color (and white teammates, I don't accept that racism towards people of color doesn't affect white people too) might not think he's racist, but you are taking their silence as prima facie evidence they don't. That's a huge assumption, at least as big as the people you accuse of judging Scott, since I think we can all accept that:
1) At least some Birthers are racist.
2) Some of Scott's described actions could, and in many cases would, offend people of color.
It's just as likely that their silence could be for a number of reasons other than "Our buddy Luke is no racist!" Scott is a marginal major leaguer; they don't think he's worth the time. They don't want to rock the boat, and openly calling their teammate racist would cause a huge fuss in the local sports media. They don't feel they'd get much support from their manager - for all we know, Joe Maddon is a right-wing racist himself, and Buck Showalter didn't exactly project a touchy-feely liberal agenda. Many of their teammates are very right-wing themselves, and they don't think they'd get support from their teammates either. They very possibly haven't been silent at all, but it's just stayed in-house. Heck, maybe Scott is playing some sort of Andy Kaufman-esque joke on baseball writers.
I'd say, "Why the hell didn't one of them mention that in the original interview? And if they did, why wasn't it reported?" Other than that, I'd be curious to hear how Scott would react to Pie taking Der K's advice in #55. If it's all playful banter, then he ought to be able to take as well as dish out.
It sure beats throwing around the "racist"/"racist comments" accusation as if someone is tossing pennies into a fountain.
But since you have no clue, let's err on the side of trashing the dude's reputation??? (And you think I'm the "turd on the sidewalk?") Wow, a certain former senator from Wisconsin would be so proud of you.
Could you please point out exactly where Flynn did that?
I'd say, "Why the hell didn't one of them mention that in the original interview?
Perhaps because neither of them thought it was any particularly big deal. Clubhouse banter and trash talk isn't required to follow UCal or Duke University sensitivity guidelines. Doesn't that thought even occur to you?
And if they did, why wasn't it reported?" Other than that, I'd be curious to hear how Scott would react to Pie taking Der K's advice in #55. If it's all playful banter, then he ought to be able to take as well as dish out.
A fair point, and a fair question, but with an unknowable answer. Obviously if all the trash talk was only in one direction, that would imply a whole different set of conclusions.
But once again---neither you nor I know this one way or the other, so why the rush to assume the worst? Scott has been in the Major Leagues since 2005, and if there have been any incidents about him that attest to his racism, there must be a hell of a lot of covering up going on.
When we start making up possible reasons why Scott's teammates are not accusing him of being a racist as grounds for implying/stating he is one, CA, that is reputation trashing. Others here have done just that, but if Flynn meant something different, I would be happy to revise my comment.
not full fledged viking horns - but little things that could be combed over.
i informed him this person was NOT an anomaly, esp. since i grew up in a half-jewish town.
jeezus keerist how many of these threads do we gotta have about luke scott is a gun nut/birther and therefore he must be a racist - threads do we have to have?
luke scott is not a racist. racists do not hang with people of color/icky minororities and luke does. racists do not treat the minority people who work for minimum wage at the ballpark with kindness and courtesy.
i have yet to find even ONE person of color or non-white ethnicity or non-american birth he has ever worked with or around who says ANYTHING about him besides - "he is the nicest person you could ever want to meet" and "you'd never know he's an athlete the way he talks to you like he is a working guy too...
Thanks for introducing a touch of reality into this conversation.
- 30 -
You racist swine.
And then we get post 94.
I didn't say racism can't be inferred from actions and words--they can inform me as to what's in your heart. I said they're not racist in themselves.
Are they hiring, like right now?
Being an idiot politically doesn't automatically turn one into a racist. And has he re-iterated his viewpoint on the subject since Obama released his birth certificate?
Sadly, some people will decide that they only can support one political viewpoint or another and will take every opportunity to slam the other side, even to the point of absurdity. The Birther movement was absurd, and I knew a lot of very intelligent conservatives that spouted that nonsense more out of a hatred for anything Democratic than anything Black. Many of the same people who took that viewpoint supported Herman Cain in the primaries, so I'm not willing to make the jump from anti-Democrat to anti-Black.
Full disclosure: I'm what would have been called a "liberal Republican" 20 years ago. I fully anticipate voting a straight Democratic ticket in November (although am open to other options).
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