Baker endures as Cubs’ expectations fall short
August 23rd, 2006
A USA Today story earlier this week describes some of the racial insults that Dusty Baker and other African American players and former players of the Cubs have dealt with.
Former Cubs center fielder Corey Patterson and former reliever LaTroy Hawkins last year received similar abuse to what Baker is getting. Cubs right fielder Jacque Jones, who had a baseball thrown at him during a game, recently got a threatening early-morning phone call.
Hawkins, now with the Baltimore Orioles, had Major League Baseball security open much of his mail last season when he was with the Cubs. He was stunned by the hatred.
“I thought that stuff was over 30 years ago,” says Hawkins, who grew up in nearby Gary, Ind. “I had never been exposed to it. … I couldn’t believe people were dropping the ‘n-word’ on me. People calling your mother a raccoon or you a porch monkey. You can only take so much abuse until you fight back.
“The same thing happening to me is happening to Jacque. To have people threatening to harm us over baseball games just doesn’t make sense.”
It’s one thing to be disgusted with a manager and players. It’s another to stoop to death threats and racism. How pathetic and classless.
In Europe, soccer fans make monkey sounds when an African player touches the ball… Spanish and German soccer fans are the ones who do it the most, which is shocking considering how Europe is supposed to be more tolerant than backwards America.
FWIW Baker says “You realize that in some people’s minds, things haven’t changed, not as much as we’d like to think everybody has changed. But I haven’t gotten [racist mail] in a while, and most of these that I got were during a period when I [said] I wanted to stay and see this through and win like I came here to do. A lot of [the article] was old news.”
Let us not suppose this idiocy is limited to Cub fans. I’m sure every black manager has had to put up with this crap.
So now racism is to blame for the Cubs’ poor performance? Just trying to understand.
Tom — I don’t think anyone suggested otherwise.
Who said that? Their poor performance is a systemic breakdown of philosophy paired with 40,000 paying fans at every home game willing to fork over the cash for an inferior product.
Then there IS that curse thing….
I meant no disrespect to African-American managers / athletes in my previous post.
My disrespect was aimed solely at Cubs fans in general (present blogging company excepted).
In regard to the article…most unfortunate. As “Uncle” Randy Stonehill sang, “It’s a Great Big Stupid World”.
Sorry, Tim, I didn’t mean to suggest anyone had. And Tony, my response was to your post. Everyone is going so fast here, tough to keep it all straight!