First post of the season

It has been pointed out to me that there's been no mention of baseball here (save that soon-to-be-replaced counter) despite the fact that the season starts tomorrow. Well, of course not: the season doesn't start until tomorrow. Frankly, scanning the sports pages and halfway listening to the Grapefruit League games when I happen across one on the car radio is about all the attention I've given baseball this March. No matter. The season is long and the Spring is always irrelevant. I'm glad that the Cardinals, by way of Jocketty/Duncan alchemy or dumb luck, seem to have assembled five starting pitchers, but let's talk about that after they've rotated through April.

Had I not been off in the great Pacific northwest--a region that has no baseball, just a franchise willing to pay Jeff Weaver $8.3 million for what, 10 wins?--at the time, I'm sure I would have chimed in on the LaRussa brew-haha (wine, I know. indulge me), but instead I missed the local stations breaking into commercials with the .093 news and never quite got into that frenzied loop.

On the other hand, I expect far less frenzy to surround today's baseball spectacle, the inaugural Civil Rights Game, which will be played in Memphis between the Cardinals and the Indians, and not, as I had first pictured, between a white team and the last nine African-Americans in the major leagues. Apparently a five-minute Spike Lee film has been commissioned and serious panel discussions will be held. So, um, okay. I know there's history there, and such a focus surely can't hurt, but given that this affair mostly strikes me as an attempt by an often-maligned multi-billion dollar industry to wear the white hats for once, I can't take it too seriously.


Some folks, however, are taking very seriously the fact that the Indians, invited to this game because they employed the first African-American player and manager in the American League, still sport a logo that's the Native American version of Little Black Sambo or Steppin' Fetchit.

As Filip Bondy of the NY Daily News put it,

"The lack of empathy on this issue is truly inexplicable. One race can’t commit genocide against another, then turn that race into a mascot. A soccer team in Hamburg would never call itself the Jews and adorn its uniforms with caricatures. It certainly would never hold a celebratory civil rights game along the trail of a World War II death march."

Is that hyperbole or an honest point? I'm not sure. It is a fact that Memphis is along the route of America's own genocide, the Trail of Tears. Of course, it's also the site of the Cardinals' AAA affiliate, and, lately, their usual stop on the trek north from Florida. MLB may be acknowledging (or sidestepping) the Indians' issue with the Indians by having both teams wear insignia-free uniforms at their celebration of certain people's civil rights today, but there's only so far they'll go. Educating Americans on our own atrocities isn't on their agenda, and I can't say it belongs there. Then again, if the baseball marketers decided there was enough money to be extracted out of Cherokee pockets, I'm sure today's festivities would have a different look.

Being far from both Cleveland and the American League, I admit to having never given Chief Wahoo much thought, but, now that I think of it, he is kind of terrible. Then again, I may be kind of terrible, too, because this solution to Cleveland's logo conundrum really made me laugh.