So according to Gary Sheffield, the decline in Black players in Major League Baseball is due to the fact that Latin players are “easier to control.”
“I called it years ago. What I called is that you’re going to see more black faces, but there ain’t no English going to be coming out. … [It's about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do — being able to control them,” he told the magazine.
“Where I’m from, you can’t control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that’s a person that you’re going to talk to with respect, you’re going to talk to like a man.
“These are the things my race demands. So, if you’re equally good as this Latin player, guess who’s going to get sent home? I know a lot of players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys.”
Okay, let’s think about this for a minute. My first response is, ‘whose side is he on?’ As a coach, if I have two players of equal ability and one player does what I tell him to do without giving me any attitude and the other player fives me flak about “respect” before he does what I tell him to do, why would put up with the second guy’s nonsense? Even if the second guy was marginally better, I still wouldn’t deal with it. Who needs prima donna nonsense when you’re trying to run a team?
But then, the bigger problem is that some folks actually think it’s a problem that Black folks aren’t playing baseball in the same numbers that we once did. For the record, even if what Sheffield says is true, I think that the NFL and the NBA have a lot more to do with the decline of Black players in MLB than managers’ unwillingness to put up with Black players’ attitudes.
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