I can’t believe that, in New York City, there’s a growing buzz that Omar Minaya is signing only Latino talent to play for the Mets, and therefore he’s biased in that direction.
Omar Minaya was terrific this week, doing his best, in a cool and understated and graceful way, to dismiss an issue about the racial makeup of his ballclub that should never have been an issue with his fans in the first place, at least not the reasonable ones.
Just because the number of Latins on the 2006 Mets is part of the conversation now in sports doesn’t mean it is an important one. If it is, then we better spend more time on it. We can’t just look at the major league roster, we need to look at the entire organization, top to bottom, count up the number of white players, African-American players, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Rico is practically the 51st state. So do we count guys like Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran as being as absolutely as Latin as Pedro Martinez, a Dominican? You can see how tricky this all can get, especially in the city of New York in the year 2006, where there are more Dominicans, for example, in Washington Heights than in any place outside of Santo Domingo.
Nobody is suggesting that a conversation about racism is necessarily racist, whether it is on the radio or in a bar. But Mets fans who actually worry about this, who worry that Minaya, a Dominican raised a few blocks from Shea Stadium, a splendid New York success story, is loading up on Latin players because he is Latin himself, need to take a look at themselves. Because what they are talking about is racial quotas. They are talking about that.
Yesterday, on our way home from Starbucks, Beth and I listened to caller after caller after caller talking to Steve Somers, a local sports-talk host, talking about this issue. One guy even told Somers that he needed to “own up” to the fact that WFAN is scared to talk about the “problem” of Minaya signing so many Latino players.
Problem?
As Somers said, I don’t care if the players on the team are blue. If they win games, they win games, and in the end, that’s all that matters. You have to wonder what goes on in the mind of someone who’s so racist they can’t bear the thought of a mostly hispanic team (something the Mets are nowhere near the top of the league in, by the way; they rank in the mid twenties). For years, Mets fans have been dying for a GM that will bring big name talent to the Big Apple and not let it slip away to the Bronx. For once, the Mets have that guy. They have a GM who can woo the big name talent to play in the dump that is Shea. Can you imagine this sort of thing happening under Steve Phillips?
Mike Lupica makes an awesome point at the end of his piece regarding the “issue.”
Omar Minaya stood above it all this week. He did not act defensive. He did not get angry, even though he has a right to ask if other general managers are being asked these sorts of questions. There was one championship Minnesota Twins team, back in 1987, that had three black players on the roster. I’d be thinking now that the Twins were pretty white. Except they won.
As with most of these things, as with the way Isiah is being evaluated now, in all matters, because of the performance of the Knicks, Omar Minaya will be judged the same way. On results. In the end, strip everything away, sports is always a results business.
“What we are trying to do,” Omar Minaya says, “is put the best players on the field.”
That is the real conversation for people who have jobs like his. That is always the issue. That is where the real counting is supposed to take place.
For true fans, it always was.
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