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.
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