4 Replies to “Race, Baseball and the New York Mets | Gotham Nation”

  1. I like Healy but this misses the mark badly. He wants to suggest that 1. racism exists in baseball but 2. there’s a huge threshold for ever writing about it.

    I disagree. Martino’s probably the best Mets beat writer in terms of digging for stories. He did a great job with this story, as far as it went. And btw, Sandy Alderson – not exactly a bleeding heart (check his California campaign contributions some time) – said explicitly that ethnic tensions were part of the Wheeler-Rodriguez incident.

    There’s a cadre of – well, let’s just say it – 100% white voices in Metsland (bloggers, Twitter, etc) who just hate it whenever culture comes into a story – race, ethnicity, language (except to poke fun at bilingual players), and national origin. It’s just baseball. Boys will be boys. Some writers just “play the race card” (a loaded term used to disenfranchise voices) and we should all stick to baseball.

    Well, I see baseball through society’s lens. I have always have. That’s part of what makes it interesting.

    Go Andy Martino.

    1. Or you do what a lot of the media does this day and just throw race in it for no reason whatsoever. You say it is culture of American born vs Latin American players from out of the country. What if it was an American born player with Latin heritage who hit a player that was born in Latin America. Is it still the same thing? Is it still American vs Latin American? Or is it not a big deal?

  2. Goon – why do you assume writers “just throw race in it for no reason whatsoever?” Why is that your default reaction here?

    Do you really believe we live in a post racial society and there are no issues on the Mets, in MLB, in professional sports, in the corporate world, in government, on the broad social commons?

    And again, it wasn’t the HBP that had ethnic overtones. Everybody agrees on that. It was the post-HBP reaction of two “factions” in the minor league clubhouse. Sandy Alderson said it happened – do you and Shannon (who posted Healey’s piece with obvious approval) claim either of these two things:

    1. That is didn’t happen?

    2. That if it did, it doesn’t matter at all, isn’t interesting, and shouldn’t be reported?

    1. Tom I am just done talking to you about this subject. You find a viewpoint to bite into that almost everyone else thinks is ridiculous and you just don’t let go no matter what.

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