Andy Martino in The News doesn’t call you racist, but he sure danced around it in this morning’s article.
I keep looking for sentences to pull out of the article, but I can’t find anything that stands alone without fanning the fire.
Basically, what my brain is processing fro Andy is – there’s a man named Luis, who is Dominican apparently, and his skin may be darker than yours, but his friend says you don’t like him because he hasn’t performed, but Luis is a good guy who mentored Reyes, who you do like, and you also like Pagan because he played well, and you’ve been tough on some white underperformers, and Castillo did miss the Walter Reed trip, and he did drop the popup, and there was once a man named Omar and there was once a man named LoDuca and all that adds up to this headline:
Mets fans have lost patience with second baseman Luis Castillo, and it is hard to ignore race factor
WHAT?
I’ve read the article 5 times and I have no idea what the point was…but I think you might be being called a racist.
I was going to say the point seems to be that spring training drags on far too frigging long, but really, given that so little goes on over such a lengthy period, you’d think Martino could take the time and flesh out his premise with more than refried background and half-witted speculation. I’d say he takes logical leaps here, but it’s more like logical limps.
But hey, here we are, with platforms of our own, giving this oxygen. If this were written by MetsFanSomething.com (apologies if that’s an actual blog), we wouldn’t give it the time of day if we happened to notice it. But it’s in the Daily News, so our instinct is to treat it as significant. The old media, per Frank Stallone, is far from over.
While it certainly could have been better-fleshed out, I think it’s a topic worth discussing.
I hardly believe that a large contingent of Mets fans don’t like Castillo because of race, but I certainly think it plays a part with some of the fan base. There is a vitriol surrounding Castillo that, personally, I don’t understand. If you want him off the team for sucking, that’s fine. But a lot of comments on blogs and Twitter involve Castillo being hated, cursed at, treated like Oliver Perez (who is the one who can rightly be critiqued for all the things poeple throw at Luis).
Why? As Andy correctly writes about, Castillo didn’t quit on the team in 2009. In fact, he was the team’s best player not named Wright all season. He did his job when called upon after being benched last year, and didn’t complain (he did talk about wanting to start, however).
Someone on Twitter brought up Reyes being beloved but Castillo being hated, but Jose isn’t loved by everyone. Do we forget the trade rumors of a few months ago where people were actually advocating to trade Jose for 10 cents on the dollar? Their argument was that he was lazy, under-performed, and didn’t seem to care about winning.
I apologize for the long comment but I think Martino brings up a point that, while not particularly thought-out, should not be immediately dismissed.
If someone’s going to go there, then let’s go both ways and spend a little more time exploring how Minaya not only “constructed a heavily Hispanic roster,” but threw HUGE chunks of his boss’ money at Spanish-speaking players either on the downward slope of their careers or based upon limited bodies of work. I mean, hey, if you’re gonna go down that road, by golly, do it.
Heck, I think Carlos Delgado got an overly negative rap from fans his last season or two, but I can understand why it was there, and it’s got nothing to do with his color or name.
In regard to Reyes and not everyone being in favor of keeping him at all costs, my take is simply that investing huge portions of your payroll in any one player is bad business, especially when 1) that player’s game is based upon his speed, he’s had recent injury issues, and any contract will take him into his 30s, and 2) you’re realistically a couple of seasons away from contending regardless. I honestly don’t care if they trade David Wright this year as part of a rebuild/restock. No one on this team has won enough of anything to cause me to be feverishly attached to them.
Oh, and someone PLEASE claim MetsFanSomething.com. I’d read that every day. 🙂