knightedsoldier5000
Mentor
Another whiny negro
https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/04/30/tim-anderson-white-sox-speaks-out
Tim Anderson’s baseball life is often a lonely one—even when he’s on first base, usually the most social stop on the diamond. “My conversation is limited over there,” he says. “It’s like, What’s up, dude? What’s up, man? How you doin’ today? Because we don’t have nothing in common.” He doesn’t speak Spanish; he doesn’t hunt or fish
is the only African-American on the White Sox roster, making him one of only 72 black players in a game that, percentage-wise, was more than twice as black as recently as 1994. For Anderson, though, this is not just a matter of statistics. He says he feels out of place in baseball, like he belongs on the field but not in the game.
Most days, he keeps this problem to himself. But sometimes it surfaces. On April 17, in the fourth inning of a lightly attended home day game, he cracked a two-run homer to deep left to put Chicago up on the Royals. The moon shot became notable for what would follow it. As he was leaving the batter’s box, Anderson spun to face his dugout, and he fired his bat toward it in triumph before rounding the bases. When Anderson came up next, leading off the sixth, Kansas City pitcher Brad Keller fired a 92-mph fastball at his backside, and the benches cleared. Major League Baseball suspended Keller five games for throwing at Anderson and Anderson for one game for what it called his “conduct”: He had allegedly called Keller, who is white, a “weak-ass f------ n-----.”
He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t think he deserved to be suspended. He doesn’t think baseball’s mostly white hierarchy should be allowed to tell him when and how he can use a word that for two centuries has been used to oppress his people. “That’s a word that’s in my vocabulary,” he says.
Sometimes the indignities are smaller. After the Royals series, he tore up his left thumb sliding into second in Detroit, so he dug around in the team first-aid kit until he found a one-inch dot the color of flesh—someone else’s flesh. “That’s small stuff,” he says. “We got bigger problems.” But it is symbolic of his place in his sport in 2019. Anderson plays a white man’s game, and he plays it in a white man’s Band-Aid.
“I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson,” he says. “That’s huge to say. But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game, and I feel like I’m getting to a point to where I need to change the game.”
He did not appeal the suspension, he says, because there would have been no point. “I don’t think there’s a black guy that’s up that high in baseball that they could drag in and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think we should do to this guy?’ ” he says. While the game has grown more diverse overall—41% of players today are of color, according to MLB statistics—Latin Americans have made up most of that growth. They too face a sense of isolation and discomfort, and they have been among the wave of players introducing emotion into the game, but the experience of a Latino is not identical to that of an African-American. At the moment, if Anderson wants to see someone who looks like him in his clubhouse, he has to look in the mirror.
For a long time he was quiet about all this. This season marks Anderson’s fourth in the majors; he had never before made waves for his play or his words. So why speak up now?
Chicago holds the second-largest black community in the country, about 900,000 people. He wants to inspire them. He wants to show them what someone who looks like them can do. “I’m bringing something to baseball that’s never been brought, as far as the swag,” he says. “I love fashion, and just being different, and bringing black culture to baseball and doing it in a different way, because today’s game is boring. . . . [After the bat flip,] a lot of people who don’t watch baseball, they actually gave me feedback, like, ‘Man, if this is going on in baseball, I better watch it.’ ”
https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/04/30/tim-anderson-white-sox-speaks-out
Tim Anderson’s baseball life is often a lonely one—even when he’s on first base, usually the most social stop on the diamond. “My conversation is limited over there,” he says. “It’s like, What’s up, dude? What’s up, man? How you doin’ today? Because we don’t have nothing in common.” He doesn’t speak Spanish; he doesn’t hunt or fish
is the only African-American on the White Sox roster, making him one of only 72 black players in a game that, percentage-wise, was more than twice as black as recently as 1994. For Anderson, though, this is not just a matter of statistics. He says he feels out of place in baseball, like he belongs on the field but not in the game.
Most days, he keeps this problem to himself. But sometimes it surfaces. On April 17, in the fourth inning of a lightly attended home day game, he cracked a two-run homer to deep left to put Chicago up on the Royals. The moon shot became notable for what would follow it. As he was leaving the batter’s box, Anderson spun to face his dugout, and he fired his bat toward it in triumph before rounding the bases. When Anderson came up next, leading off the sixth, Kansas City pitcher Brad Keller fired a 92-mph fastball at his backside, and the benches cleared. Major League Baseball suspended Keller five games for throwing at Anderson and Anderson for one game for what it called his “conduct”: He had allegedly called Keller, who is white, a “weak-ass f------ n-----.”
He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t think he deserved to be suspended. He doesn’t think baseball’s mostly white hierarchy should be allowed to tell him when and how he can use a word that for two centuries has been used to oppress his people. “That’s a word that’s in my vocabulary,” he says.
Sometimes the indignities are smaller. After the Royals series, he tore up his left thumb sliding into second in Detroit, so he dug around in the team first-aid kit until he found a one-inch dot the color of flesh—someone else’s flesh. “That’s small stuff,” he says. “We got bigger problems.” But it is symbolic of his place in his sport in 2019. Anderson plays a white man’s game, and he plays it in a white man’s Band-Aid.
“I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson,” he says. “That’s huge to say. But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game, and I feel like I’m getting to a point to where I need to change the game.”
He did not appeal the suspension, he says, because there would have been no point. “I don’t think there’s a black guy that’s up that high in baseball that they could drag in and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think we should do to this guy?’ ” he says. While the game has grown more diverse overall—41% of players today are of color, according to MLB statistics—Latin Americans have made up most of that growth. They too face a sense of isolation and discomfort, and they have been among the wave of players introducing emotion into the game, but the experience of a Latino is not identical to that of an African-American. At the moment, if Anderson wants to see someone who looks like him in his clubhouse, he has to look in the mirror.
For a long time he was quiet about all this. This season marks Anderson’s fourth in the majors; he had never before made waves for his play or his words. So why speak up now?
Chicago holds the second-largest black community in the country, about 900,000 people. He wants to inspire them. He wants to show them what someone who looks like them can do. “I’m bringing something to baseball that’s never been brought, as far as the swag,” he says. “I love fashion, and just being different, and bringing black culture to baseball and doing it in a different way, because today’s game is boring. . . . [After the bat flip,] a lot of people who don’t watch baseball, they actually gave me feedback, like, ‘Man, if this is going on in baseball, I better watch it.’ ”