By Steve Sailer
03/30/2018
From The Guardian:
Baseball, Latino America’s pastime, faces new challenges in age of Trump
Latinos account for 31% of professional players and a growing percentage of the fanbase but many owners line up with presidential policies seen as hostile
Mike Elk and Karina Moreno in Brandenton, Florida
… But this year there’s a cloud over baseball. And as players prepare for the new season, Astudillo says that in the clubhouse, one subject is on the mind of his fellow Latino ball players — Trump’s immigration policies.
My knowledge of baseball players suggests that may not be wholly true.
The Oakland A’s president, David Kazal, said his team was holding its first ever Cesar Chavez Day this weekend — celebrating the labor leader as part of Opening Day weekend festivities as a way to continue to use baseball as an integrating force.
Cesar Chavez was fiercely opposed to illegal immigration, led protests at the border against illegal immigrants, and had his brother organize a goon squad to beat up undocumented migrants.
Earlier this month, the Pittsburgh Pirates president, Frank Coonelly, spoke at the annual Lincoln Day fundraiser for the Allegheny county Republican party featuring the Trump aide Kellyanne Conway and the anti-immigrant Republican candidate Rick Saccone before the bellwether Pennsylvania 18th congressional district special election.
In a sign of how toxic anti-immigrant politics could be to the team’s fanbase, Coonelly dismissed any suggestion that he was at the Republican fundraiser to campaign for Saccone or his anti-immigrant agenda.
Okay, so Hispanic baseball fans care about the team owner’s politics? Really? I’ve talked baseball with lots of Latinos in Los Angeles over the last half century and I can’t recall the Dodgers’ owners’ politics ever coming up.
And the Pittsburgh Pirates have a lot of Hispanic fans? The Pittsburgh metro area is 86% white and 2% Hispanic.
In actual baseball news rather than Hampstead wishful thinking, Giancarlo Stanton, finally liberated from Miami where nobody cares about big league baseball, hit two homers in his first game for the Yankees in New York, where, thanks in large part to George Steinbrenner, a lot of people do care about baseball.
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