Baseball still confronting issue of race

It is just below the surface in sports, just as in society in general. How many of you have already said “racial discrimination?” It’s no secret, is it?

This past week a major league manager said to me, “You know how that goes when it’s blacks and Hispanics.” I don’t even remember what the issue was that we were talking about. He made the statement to someone he believed realized the race issue is often right there under the skin and therefore to someone who would understand the point he was making.

Statements like that by those in the games are rarely made and, vitally, never publicly. Strange, this race issue in sports. Everybody mouths the necessary lines to stay on the politically correct side of the issue and protect their jobs. No one in sports has forgotten the Al Campanis incident.

He, of the front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who, while appearing on ABC’s Nightline show, said of African-Americans that they lacked the “necessaries” in many instances to fill the role of manager at the major league level. He was condemned for the rest of his life to be banned from baseball.

Those in the games have not forgotten. Ever since that incident, there has been little said about sports and the race issue beyond the occasional call for more minorities to be hired to front office and field level management jobs.

The issue is on the front burner again in baseball because the Milwaukee Brewers have fired their GM and manager. Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, has long called for a greater representation of minorities in these positions. He owned and ran the Brewers until he took the commissioner’s job. His daughter now runs the team.

Two of the names most mentioned for the vacant positions are Dave Stewart, now an assistant GM in Toronto, and former manager Don Baylor, now coaching in Atlanta. Both are African-Americans.

We have not yet reached that point in society or sports where one of the dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King is reality. “I have a dream,” he said, “that one day all men will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

No matter who is hired in Milwaukee, the rumors will fly, publicly and otherwise. If the hired are of a minority, there will be an undercurrent of belief that that is why they were hired. If they are not minority, there will be a frontal assault of racism charged. That is why every such hiring in publicly sensitive positions, and those in sports are, need to be done with brutal honesty.

The hirings must be done with the goal to find the best people for the positions and those doing the hiring must honestly do so and say so publicly. That is what leadership is about: trying to do the right thing.

Sports have always been at or near the front in the public’s perception of racial issues. Everywhere in sports, the world’s public watches for signs of integration working or the old hatreds continuing.

Sometimes one is asked to play a role one never asked for or wanted. Wendy Selig-Prieb is the president and CEO of the Brewers. Her father is the commissioner of baseball. She must make a decision that is in the best interest of the Brewers. She does so in the context of her father having called for clubs to hire more minorities in key positions.

She will need to be able to say to her father the same thing she will need to say to the public: “I did what I thought was right, based on the content of the character of the people I hired.”

NEWS columnist Gary Thorne, an Old Town native, is an ESPN and CBS broadcaster.