Bear-Arms
Mentor
One well-known sports sociologist says Dusty Baker's disclosure of nasty letters stirs an uncomfortable subject but creates a discussion that needs to happen
By David Haugh
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 24, 2006, 11:10 PM CDT
When Dusty Baker essentially opened his racist hate mail to America by sharing details of several letters with a USA Today reporter this week, critics questioning Baker's tactics out of habit wondered if this was part of his exit strategy.
It suggested to some that Baker was just lining up excuses in case the Cubs do not offer him a contract, especially when he said he was "sorry it even came out."
Why else risk creating the perception nationally that Cubs fans had become more intolerant about their manager's skin color than impatient about their team's futility?
Why raise suspicion about every Bleacher Bum who walks into Wrigley Field being a bigot?
Why not just realize that a few kooks hardly speak for an entire fan base and a $4 million salary buys a measure of discretion when dealing with matters so potentially explosive?
Baker downplayed the story a day after it appeared, saying any hostility he felt would not affect his feelings about next year and that positive mail outnumbered the negative.
Harry Edwards, a well-known sports sociologist, said Baker revealing the contents of his most critical mail had nothing to do with an exit strategy and everything to do with providing an entry point to a necessary discussion about racism among sports fans.
"You don't get used to it just because you've been around awhile, and you never get used to someone, anyone, saying, 'N-----, why don't you get another job?"' said Edwards, an African-American and a longtime consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. "I'm not for absorbing anything quietly."
Edwards, critical of Baker three years ago when the Cubs manager commented about the weather's effect on blacks and Latinos, understands all managers and players receive harsh mail but stressed, "There's a distinction made when there is a racial dimension to it."
Edwards was in the Bay Area when Baker made public similar letters, which most players and managers receive, when he was San Francisco's manager. Type the words "hate mail" and "baseball managers" into an Internet search engine for national newspapers, and Baker is the only manager referenced in the last 13 years.
Neither White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen nor predecessor Jerry Manuel ever mentioned receiving the type of racist mail Baker received, according to vice president of communications Scott Reifert, though Guillen recently raved that white managers "don't like a Latino kicking their [bleep]."
Of the three other minority managers in major-league baseball besides Baker and Guillenâ€â€Felipe Alou of the Giants, Frank Robinson of the Washington Nationals and Willie Randolph of the New York Metsâ€â€Alou created a stir last year by objecting when a local talk-show host who was later fired slurred the team's Latino players.
But none of the minority managers have been exposed to the level of abuse beyond the dugout, or at least discussed it publicly, as much as Baker has after raised expectations in 2003 changed the culture at Wrigley Field.
"I think [Baker] has not just a right but a responsibility to talk about the letters and say it's not all peaches and cream, and it's something another manager would not have to deal with," Edwards said. "No one is served by acting like this never happened."
To Edwards, it doesn't matter if the racist rhetoric came from one fan or 100 or if the majority of Baker detractors believe his shortcomings have nothing to do with his skin color.
To him, there is no such thing as being "kind of" racist.
"Whether you were in Philadelphia and got 10 letters or Chicago and got five letters and 12 e-mails, who cares?" he said. "The reality is you have to deal with that, and the organization needs to know. Whoever the manager is, there's always going to be an element that goes beyond the boundaries of race, religion or ethnicity regardless of their coaching style. When things go badly, many people in that element will go to that feature and really rub it in."
Memories of the '60s
How large is that element among Cubs fans? Baker's predecessor, Don Baylor, implied to USA Today that he had dealt with similar problems and questioned the term "great" to describe Cubs fans.
Besides Baker, outfielder Jacque Jones said he has received mail and phone calls this season calling him the N-word. They came one year after former Cubs pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, now with the Baltimore Orioles, said he endured similar abuse that became public.
As badly as they were treated, neither Jones nor Hawkins was booed as intensely by Cubs fans as Todd Hundley, a white player.
Hawkins showed some letters he had received to Billy Williams, the Cubs Hall of Famer and special assistant to the president. Reading them took Williams back to the 1960s, when his star began to rise in racially charged Chicago.
"Any letters I got like that, I tore them up once I started to read them and put them in the trash can," Williams said. "It did happen, sure. We're talking about the 1960s. But then and now, I wouldn't characterize it as a problem for all Cubs fans. It's a few people ruining [the perception] for everybody."
Williams learned a lot watching teammate Ernie Banks gracefully and gleefully dissolve any possible racial tension among fans with a buoyant personality that made Mr. Cub nearly impossible to dislike.
Banks, who with Gene Baker in 1953 became the Cubs' first black players, once explained to the Tribune that outside of a few isolated incidents, fans treated him with the same respect he showed them.
"Everyone was looking at how we'd respond," Banks said. "People were very nice [but] kind of standoffish at first. That's why I started talking to people at the ballpark. I was new, and a lot of the fans were skeptical. They'd look and look and look. You felt you were always being watched. It was different."
'Some ignorant people'
By the time former teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins achieved stardom in the early 1970s, Jenkins recalled that most black teammates never complained of harassment by Cubs fans based on their race.
Jenkins could not remember receiving a single racist letter during his Cubs days (1966-73), but he was exposed to a few hateful catcalls while playing in Boston for the Red Sox. The worst Jenkins encountered in Chicago was getting the entire side of a new Cadillac scratched with a key while it was parked in the Wrigley Field players lot.
"Stuff like that and letters were kept more under wraps then by the team," Jenkins said. "I think a lot of Cubs fans are just more frustrated now. The ones sending those letters to Dusty, they're not baseball fans."
Bill Madlock, a third baseman in 1974-76 who still makes appearances for the team, lamented how the hostility has increased since the days he played with the Cubs. Madlock, who is black, replaced Ron Santo at third base, and a part of him feared racial repercussions that never came.
"Can't say it ever got racial with me," Madlock said. "I'm from Decatur. If somebody said or did anything, half the people in the stands were my family anyway and would have beat them up. Plus, being on the only superstation in the country back then, WGN, people thought we were part of their family."
Madlock knew that dynamic had changed when he stopped by to see Baker, an old friend, in his office this summer and saw for the strain for himself.
Race-related harassment by fans has occurred in other major-league cities too.
Last fall, for example, the FBI investigated a letter written to Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter calling him "a traitor to his race." For years, the Red Sox had only one black superstar in their history, Jim Rice, and was considered such an uneasy home for blacks that big-ticket free agents such as Joe Carter reportedly took a pass. Philadelphia famously ran Dick Allen out of town in 1969 after a career that included volumes of hateful letters and a racially divided fight with Phillies teammates.
"Fans in Chicago, fans anywhere, you're always going to have some ignorant people out there, even if 99.9 percent of Cubs fans are fine," said Madlock, who played with five teams besides the Cubs. "I think Dusty's smart enough to know it's a small, minute part of the fan base."
The Campanis legacy
Here's the irony: If racial insensitivity helps pave Baker's road out of Chicago, it also cleared the path for him to become a major-league manager almost two decades ago.
It was 1987 when Al Campanis, then a Dodgers vice president, said on ABC's "Nightline" that blacks lacked "some of the necessities" to manage.
In the resulting fallout that cost Campanis his job, then-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth appointed Edwards as MLB's special adviser for racial affairs. A movement to diversify dugouts spread into every front office.
The first thing Edwards did was contact Campanis, whom he respected, and ask for a list of minority candidates who would make good managers. The first name was Dusty Baker, then the first-base coach for the Giants and recruited by GM Al Rosen. Baker was shortly promoted to the more prominent role of batting coach, one rung closer to manager on the baseball ladder.
Edwards chuckled recalling the day Baker, Campanis and him met at a restaurant in Emeryville, Calif., that year for a short discussion that eventually led to Baker's long, occasionally controversial career in the dugout.
If Edwards had a similar conversation with a young minority manager today or a team hiring one, he would urge both sides to formalize the job description to include the contemporary challenges Baker is confronting.
"I'd suggest something in writing saying that when things go bad, you can expect a certain element of the team's audienceâ€â€I won't dignify them by calling them fansâ€â€will turn on you and you will have to manage that," Edwards said. "It's simply part of the business, and it's naive to believe that factor has been eliminated because of the 'progress' in civil rights. We are in such a period of incivility right now."
Source: Chicago Tribune
By David Haugh
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 24, 2006, 11:10 PM CDT
When Dusty Baker essentially opened his racist hate mail to America by sharing details of several letters with a USA Today reporter this week, critics questioning Baker's tactics out of habit wondered if this was part of his exit strategy.
It suggested to some that Baker was just lining up excuses in case the Cubs do not offer him a contract, especially when he said he was "sorry it even came out."
Why else risk creating the perception nationally that Cubs fans had become more intolerant about their manager's skin color than impatient about their team's futility?
Why raise suspicion about every Bleacher Bum who walks into Wrigley Field being a bigot?
Why not just realize that a few kooks hardly speak for an entire fan base and a $4 million salary buys a measure of discretion when dealing with matters so potentially explosive?
Baker downplayed the story a day after it appeared, saying any hostility he felt would not affect his feelings about next year and that positive mail outnumbered the negative.
Harry Edwards, a well-known sports sociologist, said Baker revealing the contents of his most critical mail had nothing to do with an exit strategy and everything to do with providing an entry point to a necessary discussion about racism among sports fans.
"You don't get used to it just because you've been around awhile, and you never get used to someone, anyone, saying, 'N-----, why don't you get another job?"' said Edwards, an African-American and a longtime consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. "I'm not for absorbing anything quietly."
Edwards, critical of Baker three years ago when the Cubs manager commented about the weather's effect on blacks and Latinos, understands all managers and players receive harsh mail but stressed, "There's a distinction made when there is a racial dimension to it."
Edwards was in the Bay Area when Baker made public similar letters, which most players and managers receive, when he was San Francisco's manager. Type the words "hate mail" and "baseball managers" into an Internet search engine for national newspapers, and Baker is the only manager referenced in the last 13 years.
Neither White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen nor predecessor Jerry Manuel ever mentioned receiving the type of racist mail Baker received, according to vice president of communications Scott Reifert, though Guillen recently raved that white managers "don't like a Latino kicking their [bleep]."
Of the three other minority managers in major-league baseball besides Baker and Guillenâ€â€Felipe Alou of the Giants, Frank Robinson of the Washington Nationals and Willie Randolph of the New York Metsâ€â€Alou created a stir last year by objecting when a local talk-show host who was later fired slurred the team's Latino players.
But none of the minority managers have been exposed to the level of abuse beyond the dugout, or at least discussed it publicly, as much as Baker has after raised expectations in 2003 changed the culture at Wrigley Field.
"I think [Baker] has not just a right but a responsibility to talk about the letters and say it's not all peaches and cream, and it's something another manager would not have to deal with," Edwards said. "No one is served by acting like this never happened."
To Edwards, it doesn't matter if the racist rhetoric came from one fan or 100 or if the majority of Baker detractors believe his shortcomings have nothing to do with his skin color.
To him, there is no such thing as being "kind of" racist.
"Whether you were in Philadelphia and got 10 letters or Chicago and got five letters and 12 e-mails, who cares?" he said. "The reality is you have to deal with that, and the organization needs to know. Whoever the manager is, there's always going to be an element that goes beyond the boundaries of race, religion or ethnicity regardless of their coaching style. When things go badly, many people in that element will go to that feature and really rub it in."
Memories of the '60s
How large is that element among Cubs fans? Baker's predecessor, Don Baylor, implied to USA Today that he had dealt with similar problems and questioned the term "great" to describe Cubs fans.
Besides Baker, outfielder Jacque Jones said he has received mail and phone calls this season calling him the N-word. They came one year after former Cubs pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, now with the Baltimore Orioles, said he endured similar abuse that became public.
As badly as they were treated, neither Jones nor Hawkins was booed as intensely by Cubs fans as Todd Hundley, a white player.
Hawkins showed some letters he had received to Billy Williams, the Cubs Hall of Famer and special assistant to the president. Reading them took Williams back to the 1960s, when his star began to rise in racially charged Chicago.
"Any letters I got like that, I tore them up once I started to read them and put them in the trash can," Williams said. "It did happen, sure. We're talking about the 1960s. But then and now, I wouldn't characterize it as a problem for all Cubs fans. It's a few people ruining [the perception] for everybody."
Williams learned a lot watching teammate Ernie Banks gracefully and gleefully dissolve any possible racial tension among fans with a buoyant personality that made Mr. Cub nearly impossible to dislike.
Banks, who with Gene Baker in 1953 became the Cubs' first black players, once explained to the Tribune that outside of a few isolated incidents, fans treated him with the same respect he showed them.
"Everyone was looking at how we'd respond," Banks said. "People were very nice [but] kind of standoffish at first. That's why I started talking to people at the ballpark. I was new, and a lot of the fans were skeptical. They'd look and look and look. You felt you were always being watched. It was different."
'Some ignorant people'
By the time former teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins achieved stardom in the early 1970s, Jenkins recalled that most black teammates never complained of harassment by Cubs fans based on their race.
Jenkins could not remember receiving a single racist letter during his Cubs days (1966-73), but he was exposed to a few hateful catcalls while playing in Boston for the Red Sox. The worst Jenkins encountered in Chicago was getting the entire side of a new Cadillac scratched with a key while it was parked in the Wrigley Field players lot.
"Stuff like that and letters were kept more under wraps then by the team," Jenkins said. "I think a lot of Cubs fans are just more frustrated now. The ones sending those letters to Dusty, they're not baseball fans."
Bill Madlock, a third baseman in 1974-76 who still makes appearances for the team, lamented how the hostility has increased since the days he played with the Cubs. Madlock, who is black, replaced Ron Santo at third base, and a part of him feared racial repercussions that never came.
"Can't say it ever got racial with me," Madlock said. "I'm from Decatur. If somebody said or did anything, half the people in the stands were my family anyway and would have beat them up. Plus, being on the only superstation in the country back then, WGN, people thought we were part of their family."
Madlock knew that dynamic had changed when he stopped by to see Baker, an old friend, in his office this summer and saw for the strain for himself.
Race-related harassment by fans has occurred in other major-league cities too.
Last fall, for example, the FBI investigated a letter written to Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter calling him "a traitor to his race." For years, the Red Sox had only one black superstar in their history, Jim Rice, and was considered such an uneasy home for blacks that big-ticket free agents such as Joe Carter reportedly took a pass. Philadelphia famously ran Dick Allen out of town in 1969 after a career that included volumes of hateful letters and a racially divided fight with Phillies teammates.
"Fans in Chicago, fans anywhere, you're always going to have some ignorant people out there, even if 99.9 percent of Cubs fans are fine," said Madlock, who played with five teams besides the Cubs. "I think Dusty's smart enough to know it's a small, minute part of the fan base."
The Campanis legacy
Here's the irony: If racial insensitivity helps pave Baker's road out of Chicago, it also cleared the path for him to become a major-league manager almost two decades ago.
It was 1987 when Al Campanis, then a Dodgers vice president, said on ABC's "Nightline" that blacks lacked "some of the necessities" to manage.
In the resulting fallout that cost Campanis his job, then-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth appointed Edwards as MLB's special adviser for racial affairs. A movement to diversify dugouts spread into every front office.
The first thing Edwards did was contact Campanis, whom he respected, and ask for a list of minority candidates who would make good managers. The first name was Dusty Baker, then the first-base coach for the Giants and recruited by GM Al Rosen. Baker was shortly promoted to the more prominent role of batting coach, one rung closer to manager on the baseball ladder.
Edwards chuckled recalling the day Baker, Campanis and him met at a restaurant in Emeryville, Calif., that year for a short discussion that eventually led to Baker's long, occasionally controversial career in the dugout.
If Edwards had a similar conversation with a young minority manager today or a team hiring one, he would urge both sides to formalize the job description to include the contemporary challenges Baker is confronting.
"I'd suggest something in writing saying that when things go bad, you can expect a certain element of the team's audienceâ€â€I won't dignify them by calling them fansâ€â€will turn on you and you will have to manage that," Edwards said. "It's simply part of the business, and it's naive to believe that factor has been eliminated because of the 'progress' in civil rights. We are in such a period of incivility right now."
Source: Chicago Tribune
