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Monday, April 05, 2010
Baseball, a metaphor for… Congress?
Reading Neyer’s blog post where he has this snippet:
But how much change can be initiated by a group that, for the most part, resembles what some think baseball has increasingly become — a game for older white men?
The committee has one minority member (Robinson) and one person under the age of 50 (Indians General Manager Mark Shapiro). There are no players, umpires, Bill James acolytes or women.
And, I always remember what D.L. Hughley says (paraphrasing):
I’m not taking a position as to what a woman can and can’t do with her body. What I do have a problem with is the old white guys in Washington deciding what the young black girl in Harlem what she can and can’t do with her body.
Bias is all around us. As long as the group is not representative of the people, then of course it won’t represent reality. While zero percent of the MLB players are women, I presume at least one-third of the fans are women. Don’t we want to know what they think? Or even if we only care about the “pure laine” (those fans of baseball that live and breathe baseball and therefore are the lifeblood of the game), there’s got to be at least 10% of those that are women, no? And Blacks and Latinos and Canadians and Japanese. And of course, actual active ballplayers.
I’m also reminded of what happens when an actor becomes so good, that he gets to pick a director for a movie he’s acting, writing, and producing. You get Mike Myers selecting his friend Marco Schnabel to direct Love Guru.
It seems to me that it’s like Fay Vincent is saying: unless you get the stakeholders involved, what are you really getting?
(No offense to any old white people who are readers here, or if Schnabel is a saber-fan.)
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