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Subject: Baseball and Bigotry=
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 04:45:04 EST
Message-ID: <10.1992Nov25.044505@AmeriCast.com>
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Baseball and Bigotry=

 REMEMBER the Al Campanis affair? It happened in 1987, at the
start of the baseball season, when the Los Angeles Dodgers execu-
tive made some foolish remarks to the effect that black people
"may not have some of the necessities" to be managers or execu-
tives of major league teams. Mr.  Campanis was fired by the Dodg-
ers within two days, and Peter Ueberroth, then commissioner of
baseball, went on television to condemn the remarks and pledge to
put more minorities in executive positions.

Consider now the Marge Schott affair. Mrs. Schott, owner of the
Cincinnati Reds, is being sued by a former official of the team.
One reason he was let go, the fired official said, was that he
objected to the owner's use of racial slurs. In a deposition,
Mrs.  Schott, when asked if she'd ever used the term "nigger,"
replied: "Sure.  Everybody's used the word once in their life-
time," but added that it was "very seldom" that she did. A lawyer
asked her whether she'd ever referred to Martin Luther King Day
as "nigger day," and Mrs. Schott replied that she didn't even
know what day that was. When the lawyer helpfully pointed out
that it was a national holiday observed in January and then re-
peated the question, Mrs.  Schott said she hoped she hadn't used
that term to describe it. "Is it possible you have?" asked the
lawyer. "Anything's possible," she said.

The reaction this time has been a little slower coming. For one
thing, Mr.  Campanis was an employee and Mrs. Schott is an owner.
For another, baseball doesn't have a commissioner these days -
that is to say, it doesn't have someone with a measure of nation-
al respect and a grant of power to act in the best interest of
the game. What it has instead is Mrs. Schott's fellow owners, one
of whom has been designated to exercise the powers of commission-
er should the need arise.

 So far, apparently, it hasn't. Baseball's front office says it's
looking into the matter, but nothing authoritative has been said
or done since the story broke 10 days ago. In the meantime, it's
a hot topic in Cincinnati, where the call-in shows are buzzing
and people are wondering why only one of 45 employees in the
Reds' executive offices is black, in a city whose population is
nearly 40 percent African American.

 Last summer the owners fired Commissioner Fay Vincent, who had
showed that he could stand up to one of their number (as in the
suspension of George Steinbrenner from the Yankees) and speak out
without hesitation on questions affecting baseball's good name.
The Schott affair shows just how badly they miss such a person.
02:08 11-25C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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