If I Were a Sports Talk Radio Host...

I would spend 4 hours talking about Torii Hunter. I would talk about Torii Hunter because he said (amongst other, really, really stupid things) that dark skinned Latinos are "impostor African-Americans" and that there are more Latinos than African Americans in the MLB because they will work for a "bag of chips".

To be fair, I can understand how someone can get caught up in the moment and say something stupid that gets printed, either out of context or not, and might not actually mean what they said. But to follow it up later by saying (and I'm paraphrasing) "It was a poor choice of words. I didn't mean to offend anyone. But I meant what I said, and I'm more upset that everyone got offended because it is true."

I'm not really here to argue whether what he said is true or not, or whether I agree with his sentiment. Whether the racism of the American baseball fan has caused them to assume that anyone that isn't white is black, and to assume that there isn't a problem of getting young African Amercians to embrace the game instead of basketball or football (which is what I think Torii meant).

It was just a brazenly stupid thing to say in the politically correct world we live in. One thing that I am interested in is what is going to happen to Mr. Hunter. Because this seems at least somewhat similar, at least in a racial context and on a stupidity level, of what John Rocker said to SI in the late 90's. And he was pretty much blackballed from the league within a year (it didn't help that he got hurt and then couldn't throw a strike). I firmly beleive that nothing will happen to Torii because I think there are a lot of pepole that will excuse unintentional (or not) racism from a person of color, but will not excuse it from a white person. Perhaps because many non-white people have been victims of overt racism themselves. I'm not sure. I'm also not sure why a minority player would attack other minority players. I found that strange. Maybe he thought he would get away with it?

Lastly, Torii somehow found a way to make me like him less, and I didn't think it was possible. First, he played for the Twins. Then, he would dive for routine fly balls in center field for no reason. Then, he complained about Prince Fielder's "atom bomb" celebration, and untucking his shirt like he was some sort of authority on the matter. And now this.

Stay tuned. I hope Ozzie Guillen has something to say about it, because Ozzie Guillen is the only person on the planet with less of a filter. (Ed. Note: If you read further down in the linked story, Ozzie didn't disappoint. Maybe Milton Bradley has something crazy to say? John Rocker?)

Go Go Gold Glove?

To escape the mental grind that is my life, I spent the wee hours of Friday morning sorting through baseball stats on espn.com. The goal was to compare the defense of Carlos Gomez and Torii Hunter. I wanted to look at the fancy stats (zone rating & range factor) that tell me how good these players really are defensively. I did this because Torii has long been considered one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball and the Twins were bound to miss his glove when he bolted for the Angels. I just wanted to see if this was true. Well, here's how they stack up, with their MLB rankings in parenthesis:


Holy cow!!! Carlos Gomez is super good. I guess this makes sense because he is so much faster than Torii; he has to be able to cover more ground and get to more balls. It's nice to know that the Twins have actually improved their center field defense. However, it seems at times that Gomez can be erratic, but these two statistics have to make up for it. Just to be sure, I checked his fielding percentage: .958 (last). Uh oh!!! He has made five errors in 36 games, which puts him on pace for 22.5 errors for the season. That would be 7.5 errors behind the American League record for errors made by an outfielder in a season. So, the question seems to be 'is Carlos Gomez actually good at defense?'. I would say yes because five errors really isn't that many especially when he gets to more balls than any center fielder in the major leagues. Hopefully, he will learn to chill out a little and keep the miscues to a minimum. And if he does, he could see himself taking a golden shower in defensive accolades as soon as the end of this season.