Baker stands by heat comments
By Chuck Johnson, USA TODAY
It would seem to be a common sense statement about environmental adaptation by physically differentiated groups, but is it true?
I take exception here to the two choices. The statement can be shown to be untrue and not be racist. That i think is the case here. Amateur statisticians have started examining the evidence and found little or no correlation between heat and performance.
The fact that Dusty Baker wrongly believed this does not make him a racist in any way. If we call racism any attempt to differentiate between the races it demeans the racism that does exist. In short, the statement seemed to be based on a foundation of logic, but appears to have been proven wrong. That doesn’t justify cries of racism.
The problem is that white people who have said similarly idiotic things have been thrown out of baseball. I’m thinking of Al Campanis’ statements, where he said that blacks lacked “the necessities” to be managers and executives. (Taken from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763267.html) Remember that Dusty was making his comments with respect to Shawn Estes, a white pitcher who had a lousy day pitching for a team that has something like 45% of its games during the day.
Now, was it wrong for Campanis but right for Baker or what? Personally, I think anyone looking for guidance from professional atheletes et al are nuts, so taking what they say seriously is just dumb.
People with darker skin (whether they are “Black”, “Latin”, Malay, Dravidian) can withstand greater levels of UV radiation than lighter skinned people (European, North Asian) with fewer ill effects. But resistance to temperature is probably a factor of individual acclimation. A brown skinned person from Nova Scotia will probably not thrive as well in 95 degree weather as a pink skinned person from Phoenix (to whom 95 degrees is a rather mild day). But the lighter person would still need stronger sunblock.
Anyway, by confusing “race”, “ethnicity”, and “color”, the coach’s viewpoints are not very scientific in nature.
It’s ignorant foolishness. Baker didn’t say whether the alleged difference was due to heredity. If it’s just a question of adapting to warm weather, one doesn’t need to have been raised in a warm climate. One needs to do things to cope with the heat, such as drinking appropriate fluids.
Why do some players have problems in the heat? E.g., Roger Clemens doesn’t seem to pitch as well on very hot days. It’s not a matter of stamina. Maybe he sweats a lot and can’t get as good a grip on the ball. Note that he’s from Texas, so he should be quite accustomed to hot weather.
Note that Reggie Jackson, “Mr. October”, had his most outstanding in the cooler weather, even though he’s black.
Was Baker’s statement racist? It certainly introduced race and ethnicity unnecessarily. Whatever the averages are, individual players have individual propensities for playing in hot weather. If you’re a manager you ought to treat your players as individuals, as I’m sure Baker does.
Note that Dusty Baker is black. If John Rocker had made the same comment, I think the public reaction would have been very different.
This doesn’t seem to be racism to me, either. Isn’t this is a fairly common perception?
by JonBodner:
So you’re comparing a statement about temperature tolerance to intellectual deficits? It’s not like Baker said blacks and latinos are better players period; he said is that they play better in the heat and that conversely, whites are better adapted for the cold. That’s in a whole different ballpark than saying blacks and latinos aren’t “equipped” to hold managerial positions.
by december:
Well, yeah. Because he’s already proven himself to be quite the racist xenophobe.
Isn’t it technically racist? Does it matter anyway?
As I posted in another thread, there is no objective evidence in support of Baker’s assertion. You can guess all you want, or draw whatever inferences from skin color you like, but nobody has ever provided a shred of evidence that black players, Latin players, or players from southern climates perform better in the heat than white players or players from northern climates.
As december points out, you can name lots of black/Southern players who have done better in cold parks and cold months and vice-versa. Barry Bonds - my example in the other thread - is black and has excelled playing in the coldest ballpark in the majors, park where fans wear parkas and toques to the game in AUGUST. Nolan Ryan, who is white, played almost his whole career in the hottest cities in baseball and did just fine. Sammy Sosa, black, Latin and from a hot country, has excelled in a cold park. Mike Piazza, a white guy from Pennsylvania, had his best years in Los Angeles.
Racist nonsense.
Dusty is lucky he’s black. Were he a white guy, he’d be forced (at best) to apologize or (at worst) to resign.
Gosh, Dusty says blacks and Hispanics perform better in the heat, while white boys perform better in the cold? Well, then Warren Moon couldn’t POSSIBLY make it in the Canadian Football League, where it’s cold! In fact, the Green Bay Packers and the CHicago Bears had better dump all their black players, and replace them with Norwegians.
Come on, get real! NOBODY likes playing baseball when it’s 110 degrees out, and NOBODY likes playing football when it’s 20 below zero! Whether you’re black or white, you ENDURE extreme weather conditions as best you can- you don’t ever thrive in them.
Sure, I am, because baseball is a physical activity. How you perform physically is what matters for the 1,000 active major league players and for the tens of thousands in the minors. Given his biases, is Dusty going to prefer black players over white players, when looking for someone to move from the Cubs farm system to the major leagues? When your team plays most of its home games duing the daytime in summer, heat matters. The chance to play in the bigs vs. the minors is a tremendous change in salary. Is it going to be denied because of race?
There are all sorts of stupid biases in baseball. One of the more famous ones is that only tall people make good pitchers. So what happens is that players and their agents lie about their height. If Baker’s idiocy was widespread, white players would just fake being part-Latino.
IMHO, the real difference between Baker and Campanis is that there is a suspicion that Campanis was speaking on behalf of most baseball executives. I don’t think anyone agrees with Dusty’s absurd theories. And I think the people who think Dusty is just being cooky while Campanis was the Spawn of Satan need to be clear on why there is a difference. Claiming that it is because Campanis was calling blacks dumb while Dusty was just calling whites weak won’t fly.
I’d like to introduce Cecil’s take on a somewhat similar situation, namely Eskimos dealing with cold. He describes specific physiological traits that Eskimos tend to have that enable them to endure the cold environment they live in. Is it so unthinkable that persons of African decent would have traits enabling them to better endure the heat of that continent?
Not unthinkable, just no evidence for it.
by JonBodner:
Cool your jets, dude. He didn’t call whites weak. He said:
Sure his perceptions haven’t been scientifically verified, but it’s not as if he is claiming black supremacy, unless we ignore the part where he says whites do better in the cold. Does this belief make him a racist? Maybe technically. But that doesn’t mean its equivalent to saying blacks and latinos have insufficient funds in the brains department.
I guess I’m just wondering what you want to see happen to Dusty Baker. Do you want him canned because you think his belief jeopardizes the integrity of the baseball league? Do you want him canned because you think a white guy would get canned saying the same thing? Do you think he shouldn’t get canned? What do want to see happen?
Dusty was not being “cooky”, just ignorant. Is it counter-intuitive to believe that dark-skinned individuals whose ancestors hail from hot climates are better adapted to high levels of UV and infared radiation? Is it counter-intuitive to believe that light-skinned individuals whose ancestors hail from cold climates are better adapted to low levels of UV and infared radiation?
It’s not counter-intuitive at all. Maybe not right, but the reasoning is not irrational. And in fact, dark skin has been shown to be protective against UV light. And blacks and latinos do tend to have skin that is darker than their white buddies. The rest of Baker’s assertions regarding tolerance is subject to debate, of course. But we can see where his ideas are coming from, and they’re not coming from a malicious “black man reigns supreme” kind of place.
Now, is it counter-intuitive to believe that blacks and latinos are inherently less intelligent than whites? Is the reasoning that leads to this belief free from the bias of white supremacy? What indications in nature are there that makes this idea reasonable, even if it is wrong?
you with the face:
I can’t answer for Jon Bodner, but if I may interject my $.02 on these (and related questions)…
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What should happen to Dusty? Hopefully nothing. I don’t think he said anything malicious (unlike Rocker), just wrong. I think Dusty came to a wrong conclusion based on incomplete data. Hopefully, what he said sparks honest debates and sound, unbiased research on why black people are disproportionately represented as athletes and the resulting consequences. **
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Will Dusty get kid glove treatment by the mostly white members of the media because he’s black? Probably. There is a double standard in the country when white people say similarly wrong or stupid, but not really malicious things (like Fuzzy Zoeller - he lost a bunch of sponsorships and went through a media pile-on for the things he said after the Masters).
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Does the double standard bother me as a white moderate Republican? Mildly, but that’s life. I hope - but don’t expect - that when dumb utterances are muttered in the future by both whites and blacks, that the media will take the time to explore the reputation, history, background of the utterer before engaging in their predictable, sanctimonious pile-ons.
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Do I want Dusty canned? Well, yes. Dusty’s a hell of a manager, and the Cubs are a much better team this year with him as manager, and I’m a lifelong Cards fan.
But seriously, of course not. Forget the Cal Poly Tech example illustrated by **december[/B; firing Dusty would be an obscene hypersensitive overreaction.
** I’m not an anthropologist but I’ll take a stab at why black athletes have been more successful athletically than their white counterparts (and I’m referring to baseball, basketball, and football):
First off, what Dusty said is unintentionally insulting. It reminded me of the old, discredited theories of black people having an extra “twitch” muscle that no one else has. It’s sort of like saying I can hear better because I have three ears.
Some athletes DO have physical gifts that separated them from the pack. Ted Williams and Rogers Hornsby both had almost superhuman eyesight, that allowed them to see the ball easier and therefore hit the ball better. A couple of golfers (Sammy Snead comes to mind) owed much of their success to being double-jointed.
But don’t tell me it’s because of genetics. For one, American black people are a mixture of races and cultures and pigmentation (like most Americans of any color, probably).
I think it’s a multitude of causes, but two strike me as the main ones:
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Racism and segregation (and the legacies of both) drove black people into the few successful avenues widely open to them: Sports and entertainment. Deprivation is one hell of a motivating factor.
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Athletic success is the almost exclusive domain of that segment of the population that deals with a harshness of existence.
You know all those feel-good stories about someone from the projects or the country shack that make it big in a sport, and how that’s a miracle? What a load of crap. The real miracle would be the story of someone from Grosse Point, or Beverly Hills making it big.
The fact is, you usually get the great athletes from the lower portion of the economic totem pole. Think of Rome, where the greatest gladiators were the slaves. In the U.S., before the athletic fields were open to blacks, look who reigned supreme: it was the sons of immigrants who came here from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Italy, etc. All these folks (black people included) came from a long line of ancestors accustomed to working long hours doing physical labor, enduring hardship.
Since Jackie Robinson entered baseball, the black athlete has been taking up where his white, mostly poor predessors left when their respective groups gained entrance into the socio-economic mainstream.
Feel free to shoot holes in this, but please know I don’t mean to cause offense by this post. If I have, apologies.
Nitpick: Yes, the greatest gladiators were slaves. That’s because ALL gladiators were slaves. They fought because they were forced to.
Most were, but there were also free gladiators.
Does everyone remember Reggie White? He didn’t get a pass for his racist and homophobic remarks.
by GoHeels:
I hear a lot about this double-standard, but has its existence been factual substantiated? Everytime I ask someone to provide examples of whites catching heat for something that would have been excused coming out of a black guy’s mouth, the evidence never really pans out. I don’t think the case with Baker, for instance, is comparable at all to the bullshits of Rocker, Zeller, or Campanis, and yet people are quick to point to those guys as proof of a double-standard.
I’m wondering if it possible that this double-standard is based more on perception than fact?
I agree. It doesn’t matter if the “offender” is white or black; people shouldn’t be so quick to brand them as bigotted racists. People also shouldn’t be quick to defend them if they truly said something foul. Consistency is the key. If Baker was white and the media was trying to brew up a controversy over his words, would the anti-PC police throw around accusations of hypersensitivity? Is so, for consistency’s sake, the anti-PC police should do the same for Baker as a black man. In reality, however, it looks as if all too often the anti-PC police abandons its stand against hypersensitivity and starts yelling racism as soon as the offender becomes black.
I thought your post was well-reasoned, GoHeels.