I'mpostor

Torii's comments are interesting for a number of reasons.  First off, what is he even thinking?  I mean, we all have our interesting thoughts, and maybe they even make sense in our heads, but anytime we attempt to explain them to others, they just never seem to come out properly.  Torii didn't mean to lampoon his Latin teammates or anything like that.  He was merely acknowledging a real difference between African Americans and Latin Americans, and one that exists beyond skin color.

The second reason that it is interesting is that those tensions rarely bubble to the surface.  Typically everyone is simply happy to be a part of Major League Baseball.  Teammates get along regardless of skin color or country of origin.  People are rarely concerned about the poor boy in Detroit, fielding grounders in the snow in late February in hopes of making a break into the national spotlight.  But this was an exception and the timing is curious, but perhaps it should give us all pause because it indicates a larger problem in professional baseball that does indeed center around discrimination.  Not with respect to owners snubbing potential talent in inner cities in favor of cheap island labor, but rather, with respect to American American players discriminating against Canadian American players.

Again, we generally share the same skin color, but I can't even begin to explain how many encounters I've had with players from southern Georgia accusing me of keeping their cousins out of the game due to the fact that an owner would rather pay some Eskimo-fucker from the Great White North rather than a Born Again Baptist from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, because, I don't know, I can actually locate the Dominican Republic on a map.

And people wonder why I left Boston?  It's a racist town!  No, not against Latinos, or African Americans, but against Canadians!  Sure, hoser sounds like a harmless enough term, but when you hear it on a night in and night out basis, it gets to you.  And I know Lou Merloni is a local hero, but he's retired, and he never even played left field, so how could that be a better situation for the Red Sox faithful?  It hurts... I figure that it will be easier to blend into New York City because there is such a mixture of ethnic backgrounds, that no one will have a problem with some Canadian impostor stealing an outfield position from some stiff like Jeff Francoeur... And his name is French enough to provide me some cover, as well.

And so Torii was right, in a way, since it's really not about skin color anymore.  In this so-called post-racial society that would inhabit, things appear to be even more fragmented, and it's difficult to tell whether it's a step in the right or the wrong direction.  One thing is for sure though, so amount of Michael Jackson-style facial surgery can erase the stain of my Canadian heritage, so I just hope that one day the league can accept me for who I am.  Because there are also baseball players in Canada...

There are also baseball players... In Canada.