RACIST SABERMETRICS?: The Toronto Star newspaper is accusing the Toronto Blue Jays of racism. The Jays have the whitest roster in the majors, and the article seems to blame it on general manager J.P. Ricciardi, a protege of Billy Beane who took over the team and moved it towards sabermetric principles two years ago- and this season, the Jays have been winning for the first time in years.
Circumstantially, the argument makes a modicum of sense- the type of players often favored by the sabermatricians are often big, burly, swarthy white guys (like Jeremy Brown, Kevin Millar, and the pre-Yankees Jason Giambi), and the second-whitest team in the league is the Red Sox- who were the last major league team to integrate, and are also now governed by sabermetric philosophy.
But looking deeper, of course, it's all bullshit. The Jays' two best players are a black American (Vernon Wells) and a dark-skinned Puerto Rican (MVP candidate Carlos Delgado), and their manager is Cuban-born Carlos Tosca, one of baseball's few minority managers.
If J.P. Ricciardi were a vicious racist, and cared more about building an all-white team than he did about building a winning team, I don't think he'd allow any of those people anywhere around him. And as anyone who's read "Moneyball" knows, a major tenet of Beane-style sabermetrics is that it doesn't matter what players look like. Look at Beane's A's (who served as the template that Ricciardi is using in Toronto): nearly all of the team's offense stars- Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Terrence Long, Erubial Durazo -are either black or Latino. After all, no one's won with an all-white team since prior to Jackie Robinson in 1947; I don't know why anyone would even try now.
Just like the NBA's new internationalism (which has also drawn absurd accusations of racism), the new wave of baseball philosphy has served to bring a new, refrehing meritocracy to the game. I may have my problems with sabermetrics at times, but racism is certainly not among my complaints.
Dan Lewis has more. And on the same subject, Sports Illustrated ran a controversial cover story a few years ago asking "What Ever Happened to the White Athlete?" This week? A piece by Tom Verducci on "Where Has the Black Baseball Player Gone?" Make up your mind, people!