June 30, 2003
The Whitest Team In Baseball, Or The Most Moronic Paper In Canada?
Up in Toronto, where it seems as if SARS has become a fact of life, Geoff Baker of the Toronto Star kicked up some dust on Saturday with a front page story focussing on the racial and ethnic makeup of the city's major league baseball team, the Blue Jays.
The result has been an embarassing episode of political correctness masquerading as cutting social observation, mixed with a deep misunderstanding of some of the trends that are changing the way baseball teams are put together and the way the game is played.
Here's the central thesis of Baker's article:
Venturing into the Blue Jays clubhouse less than two years ago meant having your ears filled with the buzz of Spanish dialects from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and South America.
A glance around the room would take in not only the Latin American players chatting among themselves, but also a good number of blacks from the United States dressing alongside their white counterparts. Such a scene was nothing new. A Jays team once led by Joe Carter, Robbie Alomar, George Bell, Tony Fernandez and Devon White was for years known to be as diverse as the city it represents. That is no longer the case.
A study by the Star has found that this year's edition of the Blue Jays had the fewest number of visible minorities on the opening-day roster of any of the 30 major-league teams. A Toronto club that boasted of its diversity in recent radio ads actually had the visible-minority players on its 25-man roster drop from 11 on opening day a year ago to only six this season.
The implication here is pretty easy to see -- that the Blue Jays have rebuilt their team in a way that has had a "disparate impact," on the numbers of minorities playing in Toronto. So while Baker never directly accuses the team of racism, he tars them with that brush just the same. Prominently quoted in the story was Peter Donnelly, director of the Centre for Sports Policy Studies at the University of Toronto:
"You're talking about the most multicultural city in the world," Donnelly said. "In many ways, Toronto is more multicultural than New York. So, there's a responsibility there and it probably makes marketing sense to reflect your community.
"You go to a Jays game when Seattle's in town and look at the number of Japanese fans in the stands," he said in reference to the Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki. . .
But Donnelly said having a team more in line with baseball norms regarding minorities should be important to a team struggling to sell tickets.
"I would say that it's crucial in Toronto," he said. "They can't be happy that they're only playing in front of crowds of 18,000 to 20,000. Winning is important, but there may be more than one way to skin a cat in the world's most multicultural city. And short of winning a World Series, they're not getting the attention other teams in the city get."
Later, another member of the Jays' front office pointed out that the Montreal Expos have a surfeit of Latin players on their roster, yet still struggle to draw better than 10,000 fans a game to their home games in Montreal.
Reaction up in Toronto has been running strongly against the newspaper, with both players and the front office attacking Baker and the Star's editorial judgement.
Reader reaction has also been almost universally negative as well.
Just one day after the story was released, Star columnist Richard Griffin offered up a defense of the paper that amounted to nothing more than "don't shoot the messenger." In the midst of his column, Griffin offered up this piece of idiocy that displayed not only his lack of baseball knowledge, but any real understanding of the principals that Jays GM J.P. Riccardi is using to rebuild the former World Series champ:
Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi along with Oakland's Billy Beane and other new-wavers believe in building offence through patience at the plate and taking no chances on the bases. That's a pre-WWII style of play. Under those criteria, Jackie Robinson could not have played in the majors.
Again, the implication is clear. Though Girffin doesn't have the guts to say it, he might as well say Beane and Ricciardi are no different than the bigots that kept baseball segregated until 1947. Disgusting.
For those of you who haven't read Michael Lewis' Moneyball, here's a brief recitation of what the implications are.
Essentially, offense is more important than defense. Speed, while important, is overvalued in terms of what teams will pay for it. Base stealing actually hurts overall team offense, unless it's successful more than 70 percent of the time. The key offensive statistic is not batting average alone, but batting average in combination with both on base percentage and slugging average. This makes taking walks and avoiding strikeouts critical. And the sacrifice bunt, something that was a pretty key component of the "pre-WWII style of play," has been found to be overrated as well, sacrificing a precious out that could result in a walk or another hit.
Take a look at Jackie Robinson's career stats. Right off, it's easy to see that his career batting average is better than .300 (.311), and his on base percentage better than .400 (.409). Further, Robinson rarely took a cut at a bad pitch, as he never struck out more than 40 times in any one season.
Further, Robinson was always willing to take a walk, topping out at 106 in 1952, so it should be clear that he never sacrificed the concerns of the team for the sake of his own batting average. And on the base paths, for the years in which the stat was kept, Robinson was successful stealing 76 percent of the time (1951-1956) -- well above the average students of the game have determined is necessary to help produce more runs.
If anything, Robinson demonstrated all of the characteristics front office types like Ricciardi and Beane are looking for -- what's doubtful is whether or not financially-strapped teams like the ones they work for would actually be able to afford a player of Robinson's caliber. Even if they developed a player with Robinson's incredible gifts, it wouldn't be long in today's game before he would reach free agency, and be able to command a salary far in excess of what Toronto or Oakland could afford.
We shouldn't have any doubt that baseball has a shameful racial legacy. Unlike the other major professional sports, segregation was built into the laws of the game. And while that legacy might remain when it comes to hiring managers and front office personnel, it has been erased on the field. Even worse is the fact that the Star has unfairly tarred both Ricciardi and Beane with the brush of racism, when all they're really doing is trying to field a winning team for a fraction of the cost others invest in ballplayers.
At bottom, it's a practice that's rooted in completely colorbind analysis -- something the Star's coverage pretends to understand, but only pays lip service to in the end.
UPDATE: David Pinto comments on how the new rules of scouting are going to affect players from the Dominican.
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» Toronto White Jays? from Baseball Musings
Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion comments on an article that appear in the Toronto Star that focused on the racial makeup of the Toronto Blue Jays. You can find the original article here. I think Eric does a very... [Read More]
Tracked on June 30, 2003 01:42 PM
» It's everybody's favorite beat-to-death topic ... diversity! from STICKandMOVE
Eric McErlain points out the immense, roaring stupidity of the Toronto Star. [Read More]
Tracked on July 1, 2003 03:45 AM
Say, where do the Raptors stand in terms of diversity these days? Wonder if Geoff Baker or Peter Donnelly know, or care. Lord knows no one else does.
Posted by:
at July 1, 2003 02:11 AM
You know.....I will never, eeeeever understand this "Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world" crap you hear from people from Toronto. What could that possibly mean?
Posted by:
at July 1, 2003 07:37 AM
One thing to note re: your analysis of sabermetrics: avoiding batter strikeouts is totally unnecessary. Statistically, batter strikeouts have a positive correlation with other good offensive numbers--walks and homeruns, specifically--and thus don't need to be avoided. Lots of players have low strikeout totals but few walks or homers--these are the old-fashioned "leadoff" men, someone like, say, Johnny Damon three or four years ago. SABR types don't particularly love these guys. The players the sabermetricians adore--Jason Giambi in his prime is a great example--have a lot of walks and HRs, and plenty of Ks. But the strikeouts are not a problem, and in fact are desirable insofar as they often correlate with very desirable characteristics: patience and power.
Posted by:
at September 27, 2004 06:32 PM
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