Hispanic Fanatic

One thing I don’t understand:

Why would anyone jump on Twitter and post a racial slur or homophobic tirade?

What is the upside? You rile up a dozen of your followers for 30 seconds?

Because the downside is that you look like a total fucking asshole to millions of people years from now, when your idiotic tweets are uncovered, and your career is threatened and your reputation is ruined.

That is a really bad return on investment.

Recently, major league baseball has had to deal with the fallout of several of its players who have had their old bigoted tweets unearthed.

Among them is reliever Josh Hader, an All-Star who pitches for my hometown Milwaukee Brewers.

Hader, like his fellow misguided tweeters, has apologized profusely for his words and insisted that his hateful outbursts are not indicative of who he is today.

OK, sure. Let’s go ahead and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He was a dick when he was a teenager, but now he’s older and wiser, and not a racist jerk.

But this issue goes beyond a couple of pitchers who may or may not have issues with ethnic minorities.

You see, when Hader took the mound in Milwaukee for the first time after his apology, Brewers fans gave him a standing ovation.

I can’t be the only one who found that distasteful. I’d like to think that most of my fellow fans were just trying to be supportive of Hader’s quest for redemption.

But I also know my hometown. Milwaukee has long had problematic racial issues, even by the problematic standards of the USA.

I can’t help but think that some of those fans were cheering for Hader because he wasn’t “politically correct” or because they wanted to stick it to the libs or some bizarre motivation like that. And some of them, unfortunately, were cheering for Hader’s original tweets and wanted to indicate that he nothing to apologize for.

If that sounds paranoid or accusatory, let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine that Lorenzo Cain, also a Milwaukee Brewer and also an All-Star, had old tweets surface in which he denigrated people of a different race. The catch (and I’m sure you saw it coming) is that Cain is African American, and let’s pretend that he slurred white people.

In such a scenario, it’s difficult to“imagine thousands of white fans rising to their feet and giving him a standing ovation, even after he apologizes and blames youthful indiscretion.”

It’s not just about my hometown, of course. You see,  “baseball has the oldest (average age of an MLB viewer in 2016: 57) and one of the whitest (83 percent in 2013) viewerships of any major American sport.”

It means that baseball — despite its prominence in Latino culture — has a fan base that is more likely to be both more socially conservative and more forgiving of white athletes who screw up.

And this means that young white fireballers who tweet vile things are more likely to get standing o’s, whether they are deserved or not.

By the way, I do indeed have a Twitter account. You can check it out here.

Go ahead and dig around. You won’t find any racist tweets.

As entertaining as it was to see Trump’s flunkies flail and/or plead guilty, there was another cultural asteroid hurtling across the American stratosphere this week.

I’m talking, of course, about the World Series.

Unfortunately, my hometown Milwaukee Brewers have yet to win the championship trophy. In fact, their sole appearance in the Fall Classic was over 30 years ago, and the wait is beyond frustrating.

So I understand how happy and relieved Houston Astros fans are now that their team has finally won the big game. I’m just bummed that it came at the expense of my adopted hometown Los Angeles Dodgers.

And although it was a wild series (what was with all those homeruns?), the incident I want to analyze took place not on the field but in the dugout.

If you recall, Yuli Gurriel, the Houston Astros first baseman, made a racist gesture and spat out a slur at Dodger pitcher Yu Darvish in Game 3. That ugliness is hard to hide, and Major League Baseball responded quickly by suspending Gurriel for five games… starting next year.

Gurriel, who fled Cuba last year, expressed remorse and apologized to Darvish. The pitcher graciously accepted this.

But before we move on from this tacky situation, it’s worth asking what we have learned from this incident.

Well, for starters, we’ve learned that Latinos can be just as bigoted and hate-filled as anybody else, which is not exactly a heartwarming insight.

We’ve also found out that some people still use the term “chinito,” which I haven’t heard since my childhood. I guess that word doesn’t make it into national discourse too often.

We’ve also learned that life doesn’t follow a movie script. Because if it did, Darvish would have been brilliant in his return to the mound, snagging the win in pivotal Game 7. Instead, the guy got hammered again, didn’t make it out of the second inning, and finished the World Series with an ERA of 21.60… ouch.

We’ve also discovered that Darvish, who was born in Japan, has really adapted to the California lifestyle. I mean, read the guy’s response to Gurriel. Darvish talks about “living in such a wonderful world” and says we need to “stay positive and move forward instead of focusing on anger.” He wraps up his hippie manifesto by saying, “I’m counting on everyone’s big love.” Yeah, the guy’s a Californian all right.

We’ve also realized that Major League Baseball is truly serious about punishing racist or bigoted behavior. Ha, I’m just kidding about that one. Gurriel got suspended, but if MLB really wanted to send a message, they would have expelled him from the World Series. That shit would have resonated.

Finally, we’ve also learned that you can win 104 games, tops in your league, and still fall one game short.

Baseball is funny that way.

So my hometown Milwaukee Brewers are bound for the National League Championship Series. And I’m pretty damned happy about that.

It may be awkward timing, or a little bit of a buzzkill, but I just published an article for Being Latino magazine that is critical of Major League Baseball. You can find it here.

Whatever conclusions you draw from it, however, don’t let it distract from rooting for Morgan, Fielder, Braun, and Gallardo. I know I can count on you.