THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I believe that Craig was referring more to the part about MLB replacing African Americans with Hispanic players who are undrafted with the implication that MLB is trying to weed blacks out of the game. But maybe I’ve interpreted Craig wrong.

For some reason, Tom’s it’s-all-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder perspective made me think of those blurbs Bill James would include in his writing from his wife Susie commenting on the looks and attractiveness of baseball players.

Free Association Wednesdays--they’re a barrel of fun!  Play along, won’t you?

Maybe I should be Torii’s translator.

I said this:

Imposter is not a good word as it implies intent on the part of the targetted person (in this case Dominicans). Torii must have meant that “They’re not us.  Whites see them as black.”

He said this:
http://toriihunter.mlblogs.com/archives/2010/03/a_hurtful_unfortunate_episode.html

What troubles me most was the word “impostors” appearing in reference to Latin American players not being black players. It was the wrong word choice, and it definitely doesn’t accurately reflect how I feel and who I am.

What I meant was they’re not black players; they’re Latin American players. There is a difference culturally.

If people were to not express such strong outrage so quickly, maybe we’d stop worrying about things we don’t need to worry about it in the first place.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been guilty of this in the past (on non-racial matters).

I agree with Hunter’s clarification, culturally they are very different even if they share skin color and ancestry.

However, the way the ESPN article is written Hunter is implying motive to the front offices, that they desire to have black faces but don’t want to spend more money on American blacks. I don’t think he can know that this motive is true.

Anybody who goes shopping looks for the best quaility at the lowest price. Maybe Latin players are cheaper on their rookie contract, but many of them sign at 16 instead of 18 or 21, which comes with a higher amount of risk in whether that player is as good as advertised by the time he’s potentially ready for the majors.

I would like to see more investment in baseball academies in the US, but here we also have high school and college teams, and amateur summer leagues that Dominicans generally do not have access to.

I haven’t been convinced that poor kids of African ancestry in the US have poorer access to professional baseball than poor kids of Afircan ancestry in the Dominican Republic. Plus, just because the black American kids aren’t playing baseball doesn’t mean they aren’t in professional sports, as they are vastly over represented in football and basketball in comparison to their proportion of the overall population. How many Dominican and Venezuelan kids are there in the NFL or the NBA?

Yes, of course, folks from different countries have cultural differences.  There are cultural difference even within the US. What this has has to do about race has me scratching my head.

As for ancestry, glad it is clear that dark skinned Latinos have African roots, and are “black”.  There are also “white” Latinos, most of whom are descendants of the early white colonists.  In Haiti the richest folks are among the minority white population. Some things never change.

It may even surprise some that more Africans were sent south to work as slaves than were sent to British North America, by a margin of almost 20 to one (10 million to 500,000).  I recommend reading “The Slave Trade” by Hugh Thomas. 

So they are African-Americans, even if they do not think of themselves as such. They are just not African-North Americans.

Torri is welcome to his opinion, whatever it is.

As for the drop off in US blacks in MLB, that is an interesting issue and worthy of discussion.  I doubt it has to do with racial discrimination as young talent is worth big bucks in the MLB, no matter what the color.

I think you also see this with Asian immigrants.  Koreans are not Japanese are not Chinese are not Vietnamese.  Yet “whites” tend to lump them all together culturally, or at least we did.  I think that people are generally more understanding now than they were a decade or two ago that there are significant differences.  In which case, perhaps Hunter’s comments do reveal a bit of perceived racism.

I think also raises the question about what appropriate representation looks like.  In the last census estimates, African Americans were ~14% of the US population, Hispanics 15%.

So Hunter’s point about representation is fair, but I do wonder what the expectations are.  We rarely discuss this issue from the other direction in football and basketball, in which African American’s are significantly over-represented.

Another consideration is that if the point of representation is about having role models to encourage youth participation, does perception of race/ethnicity trump the real cultural differences?

Mitch kind of touched on this, but even “whites” come from rather different ethnic backgrounds.  It wasn’t too long ago that “inter-racial” Polish/German marriages were looked down upon and forbid by parents, yet today no one has any hesitation classifying all Caucasians as “white”.

I think there is a huge difference between grouping whites, especially white-Americans, but also white-Europeans, together than black-Americans and dark-skinned Latin Americans.  White-Americans with German heritage or Italian heritage or English heritage or whatever heritage still share a lot of cultural roots and have a lot of cultural interaction historically, and have largely merged cultures in the U.S.  In Europe, there are also a lot of long-standing interactions between cultures, but they are still generally held as unique, moreso than Americans would typically differentiate between individual Latin American cultures (like Haitian and Jamaican as Tango talked about).  It would make as much sense to differentiate between the Latin American cultures at least as much as the European cultures, but that generally doesn’t happen. 

With black-Americans and dark-skinned Latin Americans, there is virtually no cultural interaction and no historical co-development.  It makes no sense to make as little or less distinction between these groups than between white-European-derived groups, and if that is what Torii is seeing, I don’t think that’s something we should just ignore.  Black-American culture has evolved as a minority in a developed, largely European-influenced culture whereas Latin American culture has developed completely independently as a majority in mostly un-developed, autonomous nations by blending a lot of African culture with pre-European colonization culture with some Spanish our French culture mixed in.  There are virtually no connections between black-America and Latin America, be that dark-skinned or light-skinned Latin America.  There are major cultural divides and a near-universal language barrier.  Torii is right that it makes no sense to group them together to view the number of dark-skinned players in the game as synonymous with the number of black-Americans in the game, which I think a lot of people do.  I’ve heard fans respond to things like the a team not having any black players by saying basically, “Latin Player X is black.  Why wouldn’t you count him with the other black players?” I’ve definitely seen a tendency to consider all dark-skinned players under the same cultural umbrella.  Obviously, that doesn’t mean I know anything about the prevalence or implications of that sentiment, but I can definitely see where Torii is coming from with this statement.