Who’s a Latino Baseball Legend?
It’s one of the great dilemmas we run into whenever anyone in our melting pot culture tries to create any sort of list based on racial identity. In this case, Major League Baseball is attempting to honor it’s greatest Latino players. At first glance, it’s a noble and worthy gesture, but like anything else Major League Baseball tries to make simple, it’s fraught with questions and problems. Most notably, just who qualifies as a Latino? Does it require a Latino surname? Must a player be at least a certain percent Latino- and just what the hell does that mean? Certainly, honoring Latino players is a worthy endeavor, because without them, baseball would be a much less entertaining game. (For years in the early ’60s, Minnesota Twins players used to joke that the “TC” on their caps stood for “Twenty Cubans”.)
Few baseball fans remember that Ted Williams was half Mexican (via his mother), or that Reggie Jackson’s middle name was Martinez (his father was half Puerto Rican). Jackson and Williams are arguably two of the greatest players in the history of the game, but should they be considered Hispanic? I’m not arguing yes or no, I’m merely asking the question, because it does have an impact on who would, could, and should be included on MLB’s ballot- and both Jackson and Williams were left off.
When Major League Baseball unveiled its ballot for the Latino Legends team Tuesday, the 60 nominees excluded two of the greatest Hispanic players ever: Ted Williams and Reggie Jackson….
Had baseball made an egregious historical error by omitting Williams and his career .344 batting average or Jackson and his 563 home runs?
Not according to baseball. A spokesman, Carmine Tiso, said it was aware of the players’ ethnic backgrounds but applied a litmus test that went beyond statistics: the nominees had to have a direct connection to their Latino heritage. A second spokesman, Richard Levin, said they should “represent the Latin community.”
So, in other words, neither Williams nor Jackson were “Latino enough” to be included on the ballot? Just how, exactly, is someone supposed to “represent the Latin community”? The problem, of course, is that this is a highly subjective interpretation, made by those with their own agendas and definitions. No, Williams did not openly mention or advertise his Mexican heritage, and while Jackson never advertised his 25% Puerto Rican heritage, it was never much of an issue during his career.
Tiso said: “It’s a gray area. It’s not an exact science. There may be other players with Latino heritage who may not acknowledge it.” He admitted that not all players on the ballot have publicly discussed their backgrounds.
I’ll say it’s a gray area- and that is exactly the problem. As long as Latino players are discussed in the abstract, personal interpretations are hardly going to matter, because that is part and parcel of individual opinions. Once you try to quantify what a “Latino” player is, you’re going to discover all sorts of unintended problems. And, MLB being the collections of f—-kups that it is, it’s rushing in where angels with any gray matter at all fear to tread.
Baseball, which did not reveal its selection qualifications during its Latino Legends news conference, did it yesterday. And while it stated that mlb.com participated in the player selection, Jim Gallagher, a spokesman for mlb.com, said it only made a few suggestions after baseball presented a list of nominees.
This is a great idea, as long as it remains a matter of abstract debate. Once you try to try to quantify who is Latino and why, you’re going to open yourself up to all sorts of reasonable but very uncomfortable questions. Must a player have a Hispanic surname? Must Spanish have been a player’s native tongue? And what of those, like Jackson and Williams, of mixed racial heritage? There is simply no way to create an exhaustive and accurate ballot of Hispanic players, because race and ethnicity are highly fluid, not static, concepts. If a player (like Reggie Jackson) is 25% Hispanic, is he “Latino enough”? Should the threshhold be 50% (for Ted Williams)? This is not an argument that will ever be settled, and thus any list of baseball’s greatest Latino players will be essentially meaningless.
Of course, this is Major League Baseball we’re talking about. Could we reasonably have expected anything less than a first-class clusterf—k? At least they haven’t disappointed, eh?
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