what would happen if this was an article where the player who was interviewed and spoke out happened to be, John Rocker?

A white player could NEVER have said the same thing. I am not saying a white player saying this would have been right, any player no matter his race saying what Hunter did deserves to be fined, suspended, and possibility thrown out of baseball.

It’s that there’s a huge contingency of assholes. When one of the 5 best pitchers for your team of all time has to shut down his blog because of all the disparaging comments, you know something is wrong.

But when a city is as segregated as Chicago, and you have a team that plays in the whitest part of the city, it’s only natural that race is going to be an issue. Being able to discuss is sensibly without getting irrationally defensive is the hard part.

African AMericans/black and insert Whites/Caucasions

and guess what happens………….he is said to be racist, and MLB would take action against him

or any other white ballplayer, to make the same kind of foolish statements that Hunter did. If he were to suggest there should be more white players in MLB, while implying that less-qualified Hispanics are hired and exploited by owners, he would provoke a media firestorm.

A double standard exists, and Hunter probably will be given a pass for his insensitive comments, both by media and by MLB.

You can obviously read, because you’re posting in this forum. But I just can’t understand how you jump from Point A to Conclusion Z with no steps in between. Let me just clear the air.

I didn’t “defend Torii Hunter” the other day. I pointed out that, contrary to your incorrect statement, Torii Hunter never “turned down the Cubs”, was in fact never offered by the Cubs, and in after the fact, told Derrek Lee that he would have joined the Cubs if offered.

Torii obviously put the Cubs on his no-trade back in ’05 or ’06 after talking to Jacque and LaTroy and concluding that Wrigley was racist. He equally obviously had a change of heart at some point.

My beef wasn’t entirely with you – it was with the notion that it was “common knowledge” that Torii had turned down the Cubs when he was a free agent after ‘08, and that the reason was that he believed that Cubs fans were racist. Those statements are almost entirely extrapolated from the April ’09 Wittenmyer column, and they aren’t true, as established by the March ’08 Wittenmyer column.

I agree completely with Damen – Torii is making some rather controversial statements, which are exacerbated by his very poor choice of words in using “impostor”. He’s also going 2 or 3 steps beyond where he needs to in order to make his point, talking about some kind of conspiracy to go get Latin players b/c they’re cheaper. It’s bad enough that young AA athletes don’t even consider baseball. There doesn’t have to be a plot behind it.

I also totally agree with Dartmouth below, who notes that the distinction between “white guys” and “euro white guys” in the NBA is commonly discussed, without all of the high-voltage implications. You’ll often hear someone say “What about Dirk Nowitski, he’s white….”, and get the response “well, no, he’s German, that’s different.”

At the bottom, Torii has a point here – baseball has been dying as a sport among young African-Americans, and it shouldn’t be. That said, he digs himself a huge hole by calling Latin players “impostors” and talking obliquely about potential conspiracies.

very well said

Perhaps MLB could hire some NBA scouts as consultants since they obviously have no problem going into those areas.

The reality of baseball economics has created a lot of incentive to pour money into developing players outside of the country. He points out that the same thing is happening to white players.

His phrasing might be conterversial, but his point is spot on and the idea that it’s racist strikes me as silly.

Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki took home 3 MVPs in a row as (generally speaking) slow, unathletic white people. A lot of people made the claim sportswriters gave them preferential treatment because of the lack of elite white players, and those awards could have been awarded to other black players.

As for the “unathletic” tag, that’s mainly a problem with perception of what athleticism truly is.

it makes more sense to develope here and have cost controlled talent. sadly in America basketball and football are played a lot more than baseball, leading to lesser talented players in some cases being from America (and i believe Puerto Rico is part of the draft as well).