Dichotomy of 2 idiots
HOUSTON — In the same news cycle in which Bob McNair got it, got it good, for saying that you can’t have the inmates running the prison in the NFL — bad choice of words, excellent insight into the man — a Cuban-born baseball player, Yuli Gurriel, made a racially insensitive gesture directed at the Japaneseborn starting pitcher for the other team, Yu Darvish.
What Gurriel did was dumb, absolutely. He was asked about it after the game, because by then he had exploded social media at the same time McNair was still exploding it. He then apologized, tried to explain what he meant, suggesting that he was making a joke with his teammates about how little success he’s had against Japanese pitchers, and how perhaps Darvish — against whom he had homered, loudly, in the second inning — had pitched him as if he, Gurriel, were Japanese.
He gets a 5-game suspension from Commissioner Rob Manfred, to be served at the start of next season. It is a fair and just resolution, Manfred knowing that any attempt to suspend Gurriel from the World Series would have been appealed, and most likely not adjudicated until spring training.
“I just feel bad,” Gurriel said through an interpreter. “If anybody got offended over there, it was not my intention.”
Whether you are from this country or Cuba or Japan, an apology like that was as inevitable as the tide. Gurriel, a 33-year-old Cuban baseball player who has played professionally in Japan, offered the same basic theme as the 79-year-old white billionaire owner of the Houston Texans.
But what is really interesting about this, because this happened with Gurriel in Houston on the day when McNair’s comments about inmates and prisons went properly viral, it is that McNair will face no sanctions or reprimand from NFL commissioner for offending not just one player, but an awful lot of players on McNair’s team, and across the National Football League.
The difference here is that Manfred is the boss of Yuli Gurriel, and Yu Darvish, and everybody else who plays Major League Baseball for a living. McNair and his friends? They’re the boss of Goodell.
Was Gurriel, even though he said he was joking, revealing his true self? Maybe. It is far more likely that is exactly what McNair was doing, putting a foot in his mouth the way the president to whom he contributed a million dollars (one of seven owners to contribute to Donald Trump’s campaign) frequently does, whether McNair meant to reference inmates running the asylum or not. McNair talked about “inmates.” Trump called players kneeling for the anthem “SOBs.” Jump ball.
And maybe the worst part of this story is that on the day McNair said what he said not only was not called out as an idiot by any other owner, he clearly wasn’t the only idiot in the room.
Daniel Snyder, the owner of a consistently mediocre Washington team — what’s worse, incidentally, a racially insensitive gesture from a ballplayer are one of the most racially insensitive team nicknames on the planet? — offered this wisdom about anthems, and the always-enlightened Jerry Jones:
“See, Jones gets it — 96%of Americans are for guys standing.”
You wanted to ask Snyder — he always reminds you of an old Bill Parcells line, about people who don’t know whether a football is blown up or stuffed — what kind of scientific polling he has done across America to come up with that figure. Maybe he was just another rich guy using colorful hyperbole the way Bob McNair had. Maybe, as someone once wrote of Trump, we’re just not supposed to take any of these owners literally.
Gurriel had to apologize because he got caught on camera, making the dumb gesture he did. McNair had to apologize because he got caught, period, saying something as dumb as he did, and then learning that a lot of his players almost walked out of practice on Friday because of him. Now he says he wasn’t referring to players when he talked about inmates, but the league’s administration. Sure he was.
This all started because less than two weeks ago, Goodell convened representatives of the sport, including players and owners, in New York for meetings to discuss the anthem protests and the reasons behind him, and look for ways that owners and players could move forward in constructive ways that might actually involve constructive and meaningful change. McNair was one of the owners at the original meetings. When all of the others convened the next day, he said what he said about inmates. Snyder said what he said about “96%” of Americans wanted football players to stand for the national anthem. To the end, these men don’t want to know what they don’t want to know about their players’ beliefs, intentions, social concerns. Or their humanity.
Should Yuli Gurriel have known better on Friday night? He should have known better. He was properly punished for what he did. Was he being racially insensitive? He was. But in the world of sports right now, and especially in another big sport – professional football — he has to get in line. And sadly it seems that the line doesn’t just keep getting longer. It continues to move.