Ozzie Guillen: Latinos At Disadvantage When Entering Baseball

Ozzie Guillen spoke with reporters about race-related issues at length today, citing disparities between the luxuries afforded to Asian baseball players and to Hispanic players. It’s worth a read, especially when Guillen begins going into the specifics of the disparities that he sees at his son’s Single-A team.

And yet at the same time, it’s Ozzie Guillen, the guy who causes ruckuses (rucki?) at press conferences and disparages umpires and talks candidly about his Venezuelan heritage. That Ozzie doesn’t have much capital with the majority of American fans, and the “we’re so tired of him complaining about racism” responses are, to say the least, predictable (the first comment on that CBS link, for example, calls Guillen a “terd” [sic] and doesn’t get any better).

But here’s the thing: Guillen’s not accusing anybody of racism.

His comments are that Hispanic players are treated differently, and nobody would (or should) argue that fact. There are non-racist reasons for those differences, after all.

1) The age ceiling for signing most players from Latin American countries is much lower (16 to 17, according to Ozzie) than for American (22-23) or Asian (sometimes as high as 30) players. Obviously, the thought here is that the Latin American countries aren’t as well-equipped to develop baseball talent as the minor league, high school, and college programs up here are.

2) Asian players are more likely to receive translators than Hispanic players. Asian players are also much less likely to be surrounded by peers or coaches who speak their language. If each team had only one or two Spanish-speaking players, best believe there’d be a translator at the ready. The institutional wisdom is that with so many Spanish-speaking players and coaches per team, a professional translator would be unnecessary.

Now, whether that’s actually true is a subject worthy of debate. Guillen clearly believes it’s false, and that it contributes to a lack of meaningful communication between Latino players and their English-speaking authority figures. Hence, his belief that 3) not enough people are acting discouraging PED use among Latino players--and acting as a counterbalance to more familiar (by way of speaking Spanish) PED dealers.

But just because these disparities have logical roots doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be talked about or that the conversation ends there. These disparities are, to Guillen, serious problems regardless of their origins. Again, Guillen never accuses any of this of being rooted in hatred of Hispanic people. That wouldn’t make sense, for numerous reasons. And if Ozzie’s not playing the racism card, well, why is anybody else?