Ursa Major said:
statler & waldorf said:
There's the transcript of his comments:
"It's too complex? I've NEVER Night into that 'baseball is too complex.' Really? A Thursday of the sport is from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world class academic abilities. A lot of the kids come from enough backgrounds and have not had opportunities académically That other kids from other countries have. Baseball is like any sport. It's mostly instincts. A sportswriter who covers baseball could go up to Tony La Russa and make an argument and Tony would listen and it would seem reasonable. There's not a single NFL writer in the country who could díagram a play for Bill Belichick. You know, we get caught up in the whole' thinking man's game.' Is it in the same family? Most people could do it. It's not being a concert pianist. It's in the same family."
Show me, and everone on eGriz, exactly what is racist or bigoted in those words.
He should of been canned for being intoxicated or illiterate. . .
If, indeed, that "transcript" is totally accurate -- which I somewhat doubt -- then he
was drunk (he's not illiterate ... I'm no fan, but he's not illiterate). Otherwise, I do not see anything racist or bigoted about what he said. He did not say (again, assuming the sense is correct, if not the exact wording), that DR folks were dumb ... he said they had academic problems. The only guy from DR I knew reasonably well did, in fact, have academic problems (he struggled with a junior college curriculum). But he was not dumb, spoke
excellent English -- better than many of my fellow students -- and had a lot of what we now call "street smarts."
Cow-turd, was, in any case, just plain wrong. Most sports, even at lower levels, require much more thought than most people seem to give them credit for ... and baseball is one of those. I'm forced to ask (seriously): Did C ever play
any sport, at any level? How much practice, and thought, does he think it takes so it looks like "mostly instinct." Case in point: Playing the outfield (my position, most of the time) looks like you just run to a place and stick your glove out. Bull***t! You start with the sound of the bat. What "instinct" tells you how solidly the ball is hit? It doesn't. You learn by thinking (there's that word) about what the ball did when it sounded a certain way. What "instinct" tells you that a ball hit a bit off-center will spin towards or away from you? Same thing. You track the flight of the ball, and factor in all that other stuff as you run to where your experience (NOT instinct) tells you it will be. For me, the ball hit high and straight at me was the toughest because it tended to wobble in flight rather than following a predictable trajectory ... and it was sometimes hard to predict how far it would carry. (And, since I was not really "fleet of foot," I could not make up for mistakes by running under a bad prediction.)
It goes on. Just in the last day or so, TV replay showed a sequence on a bunt where the bunter got an easy hit because the 2nd baseman did not rotate properly to cover 1st base. The run scored anyway, but the hitter (bunter) should have been out easily. Even in the outfield, we were taught to review in our minds ("think about") what we were going to do on any ball put in play, based on the situation. It's not "instinct" to understand that the runner on 2nd is really slow (or really fast) so you may (or may not) have a chance to nail him if he tries to go home. Yes, you must have the physical skills, but they must be honed to perfection by practice and thought.
In football, it's not "instinct" when a DB "jumps" a route and makes an interception. It's hours of practice and watching film that makes it look that way. Again, you have to have the physical skills to pull off the play -- does no good if you don't have the quickness and hands to actually do it. If Cowherd truly does not understand that, he really should get out of the business. I think he probably does, and just had a bit of a lapse.
As I said earlier, I think ESPN was just looking for an excuse to dump him. Which makes sense, if he really had already arranged to quit and go to work for Fox (as suggested by Ursa M). Better to fire him for "improprieties" before he dumps them to got to work for a competitor (and maybe for more money
).
