Have No Doubt: Cowherd's Comments are Racist



This appeared yesterday.

People were wondering what Cowherd could've said that got Bautista angry. (Angry Bautista, by the way, is one of my favourite Bautistas. Collect them all!)

And then I read it. It was a discussion about how an inexperienced Dan Jennings got the manager job for the Miami Marlins.

Deadspin posted a video of Cowherd's spiel and cut off after this choice line:

“It’s too complex? I’ve never bought into that ‘baseball is too complex.’ Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic.”

Oh.

Cowherd went on for longer than that and added a little nuance that some are convinced relieves him of being racist:
“It’s too complex? I’ve never bought into that ‘baseball is too complex.’ Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world class academic abilities. A lot of those kids come from rough backgrounds and have not had opportunities academically that other kids from other countries have. Baseball is like any sport. It’s mostly instincts. A sportswriter who covers baseball could go up to Tony La Russa and make an argument and Tony would listen and it would seem reasonable. There’s not a single NFL writer in the country who could diagram a play for Bill Belichick. You know, we get caught up in this whole ‘thinking-man’s game.’ Is it in the same family? Most people could do it. It’s not being a concert pianist. It’s in the same family.”
Ok- for the Belichick thing, I'm going to throw it over to Andrew Stoeten:

For one, yeah, I’m sure Belichick is coming up with a formula for cold fusion, and only true scholars, like fucking Gronk and the guy who keeps murdering people, are going to be able to decipher his plays. For two, fuck Colin Cowherd and the people who employ him.
I would also like to explain to anyone who thinks this is a reasonable and not racist argument: people need to stop equating educational opportunities with intelligence.

After a break, and maybe a memo from a producer, Cowherd elaborated and said all baseball players are pretty dumb because fewer of them have degrees versus NBA or NFL players.

This completely ignores the fact that the NFL and NBA mostly draw from a pool of mostly US players and that the systems are completely different.

Also, from personal experience, I went to a pretty prestigious Canadian university and while I knew a lot of very smart people, I also knew a lot of idiots. And some of those idiots got degrees. It's not a measure of intelligence. It just isn't.

He also said that many of the Latino players don't speak English, but manage to live in the US and play baseball with no issue.

If anything, that would suggest that they are more intelligent. A lot of these guys learned English as young adults, which is incredibly difficult, and also manage to live in a completely new culture.

Finally, I have a huge problem with the "instincts over intelligence" argument because that sort of thing has a long history in racist theories. It's almost a calling card of racist intellectual thought. The word "instinct" is associated with primitive or animalistic. It's not good.

And as Hardball Talk pointed out, this began as a discussion about the relative capabilities of Dan Jennings and Cowherd threw in the stuff about Dominicans.

The MLBPA is pretty angry about the comments.

The person, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic, also said the lack of response from ESPN - and Cowherd's future employer, Fox, has upset its members just as much as the comments, and they will consider withholding cooperation with the networks. ESPN and Fox are national rightsholders to major league games, and Fox carries its jewel events, the All-Star Game and World Series.
MLB released an official statement:

“Major League Baseball condemns the remarks made by Colin Cowherd, which were inappropriate, offensive and completely inconsistent with the values of our game. Mr. Cowherd owes our players of Dominican origin, and Dominican people generally, an apology.”



It's all over Twitter:














Obviously, this is still evolving. It's still racist, though. And it's particularly upsetting that we are still hearing these kinds of harmful stereotypes paraded around as facts in sports media.