One of the great joys to my retirement has been having the time to watch baseball again. I’ve become a White Sox fan after growing up rooting for the Cubs. So I’m watching the White Sox play the Yankees today and at the end of the 3rd inning, for seemingly no reason, the benches clear and Tim Anderson, our star short stop and all around team spark plug, has to be forcibly restrained by two other players and physically pulled into our dugout. At the other end of the trouble was the man who seems to be always stirring up trouble: Josh Donaldson.
At the time, no one knew what had happened, but Josh Donaldson and the Sox have bad blood going all the way back to last season, so we all pretty much just assumed it was just that.
It was worse:
"He just made a disrespectful comment," Anderson said. "Basically he was trying to call me Jackie Robinson. 'What's up, Jackie?' I don't play like that. I don't really play at all. I wasn't really going to bother nobody today, but he made the comment and you know it was disrespectful and I don't think it was called for. It was unnecessary."
For those who don’t know, Tim Anderson is black.
Cue the typical script for people like Donaldson:
Donaldson on Saturday said it was a reference about which he's "joked around" with Anderson about it in the past.
Ah, he was just joking around…
"My meaning of that is not any term trying to be racist by any fact of the matter,'' Donaldson said.
See, he wasn’t being racist at all…
"Obviously, he deemed it disrespectful. And look, if he did, I apologize.
If the object of the racist remarks was offended; Donalson’s sorry that he was offended…
That's not what I was trying to do by any manner and that's what happened.''
Nothing to see here. Move along.
White Sox Manager Tonly LaRussa didn’t mince words:
"He made a racist comment, Donaldson, and that's all I'm going to say. That's as strong as it gets," La Russa said.
Major League Baseball has said there will be an investigation. We’ll see. Is Donaldson the type of person they want representing the game Jackie Robinson played?