Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Uh oh, he cited HateStats.

Here’s what Cowherd said in his follow-up:

“For the record, I used the Dominican Republic because they furnish baseball with so many great players. But they do rank 122nd out of 144 countries in primary education according to the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Report.”

Big mistake. You don’t get fired for being wrong, you get fired for being right.

Here’s an article I found from ten years ago on DR’s levels of educational achievement:

SANTO DOMINGO.- Only 50% of the students who enter the first grade in the Dominican Republic reach to complete just four years, 22% complete the eight year elementary cycle and only 10% finish secondary schooling, figures which place Dominican Republic among the countries with the highest school dropout rates.

By the way, here’s Jason Malloy’s meta-analysis on the handful of IQ studies of Dominicans.

But knowing HateStats, must less mentioning them, is unforgivable. And so he’s gone.

It added, “Colin’s on-air response today addressed the importance of making sure his opinions are fact-based and responsible for all people.”

But not too fact-based.

My favorite Dominican ballplayer of all time was L.A. Dodgers 1980s slugger Pedro Guerrero, who got acquitted on a cocaine distribution charge in 2000 by reason of stupidity. The AP reported:

A former major league hitter was acquitted of drug conspiracy charges Tuesday, after his attorney argued that his low IQ prevented him from understanding that he had agreed to a drug deal.

Federal prosecutors argued that Pedro Guerrero, formerly of the Los Angeles Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals, told an undercover agent and an informant that he would guarantee payment for a $200,000 cocaine shipment.

But Guerrero’s lawyer, Milton Hirsch, told the jury that the four-time National League All-Star and co-MVP of the 1981 World Series was duped by his friend, Adan “Tony” Cruz.

“He really never understood that he was being asked to involve himself in a drug deal,” Hirsch said.

The jury acquitted Guerrero after four hours of deliberation.

Guerrero, 43, retired from baseball in 1992. Hirsch said he dropped out of sixth grade in his native Dominican Republic, and has an IQ of 70, Hirsch said. The Miami resident can not perform simple tasks, such as writing a check or making a bed, and receives a small weekly allowance from his wife, Hirsch said.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I heard John Kruk tell a story about Pedro Guerrero about a decade ago on the radio. He said it was common during Saturday afternoon home games to see a player from the road team make it to first base with an obvious hangover from a late night before the game. Kruk said Pedro would get to first base and he would still be drunk. He must have been an incredible hitter.

* Come on everybody knows baseball is the least cerebral team sport of them all unless you call track and field and swimming teams sports because of the relays.

The most cerebral part is when pitchers and catchers study the batters to determine how to pitch to them. Good batters will study the pitchers if they want a decent career which it seems like last year’s sensation Yasiel Puig does not.

* It’s funny how you can tell the things they all take for granted by the things most quickly punished. I mean, no one ever gets in trouble for asserting European basketball players just can’t manage the complexity of the game, or that blacks just aren’t athletic–at least the Narrative System would freeze, briefly, trying to process it before shaking its head abruptly and assuming the posture.
It’s like the quote you like about how Marxian tactics are really about humiliation, and no one gets in trouble for saying two plus two equals five. No one really gets in trouble for being wrong.

* They got Larry Krueger of the SF Giants radio home about ten years ago for the following gems….“brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly.” and, “They’re not ‘walking’ off the Island”.

No wonder the sports guys are the most politically correct!

* Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

Nonetheless, the easiest way to get people mad at you is by telling the truth, and the unhinged response to Krueger’s “gaffe” stems from the fact that Latin players have long benefited from what I called “Baseball’s Hidden Ethnic Bias.” In my 2003 article, I pointed out that because baseball executives long didn’t understand the run-producing value of walks, “the Anglo white-dominated baseball establishment had actually tended for decades to discriminate irrationally against Americans and in favor of more free-swinging Latin hitters, who on average weren’t quite as productive as their batting averages indicated.”

This bias has been mitigated somewhat by the recent rise of Bill James-inspired general managers who correctly emphasize on-base percentage over batting average, like Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics and J.P. Ricciardi of the Toronto Blue Jays (who was criticized for dumping highly paid Latin players like the Raul Mondesi and signing cheaper American whites who were better at getting on base). I pointed out:

Although they are slowly improving, Hispanic players are on average less likely to accept walks than whites or African-Americans. “It’s not easy for a Latin player to take 100 walks,” said Sammy Sosa early in his famous 1998 season.

In 2002, Hispanics had a combined batting average of .264, while everyone else together hit .260. On the other hand, the Hispanic “walk average” was 0.060, while the non-Hispanics’ bases on balls ratio was 0.069, a significant 14 percent higher, leaving the non-Latinos with a five point better on-base percentage.

The patience gap has declined somewhat, from 16 percent in 1992 and 19 percent in 1982, probably because Latinos have largely closed the power gap. Twenty years ago, non-Hispanics hit home runs 42 percent more often than Hispanics, but that difference was only 4 percent last year. [More]

Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen weighed in, demanding Krueger be punished more. Guillen is particularly sensitive about aspersions on Caribbean players’ plate discipline because he himself was famously bad at laying off pitches out of the strike zone. His career on-base percentage was a terrible .287.

The San Francisco Giants were the first big league team to seriously tap the mother lode of baseball talent, the sugar cane fields of the eastern Dominican Republic, where black immigrants from Jamaica settled a few generations ago. Besides Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal, the Giants featured the first all brother outfield in history in 1963, with Felipe (now the manager), Matty, and Jesus Alou.

All three Alou brothers exhibited poor plate discipline. In a combined 47 seasons in the big leagues, none of them ever managed to get 50 walks in one season. Still, Felipe was a good hitter, with some power, and Matty put up gaudy enough batting averages to make up for his lack of homers and lack of walks.

But the only reason Jesus Alou could have stuck around for 15 seasons was because general managers back then evaluated players more by their batting averages (Jesus had a solid-looking career average of .280) and “how they looked in a uniform” rather than their on-base percentage (Jose had an awful .305) and slugging average (a lousy .353 for Jose, who was a slower than average outfielder and miserable base stealer), which dysfunctionally favored Latin ballplayers.

At 6′-2″ and 195, Jesus looked like a terrific baseball player, but for his career, he was only 87% as good as the average hitter, which makes him, among below-average fielders, one of the worst hitters to hang around for 15 years. Today, Billy Beane of Oakland would have immediately traded Jesus for a pudgy-looking college educated white ballplayer who could refrain from swinging at bad pitches.

(Felipe’s son Moises is playing for his father this season at age 38, and he remains a strong hitter. Moises’ plate discipline is better than that of the previous generation of Alous, although it’s not great for a power hitter. Moises peaked at 84 walks when he hit 38 homers in 2000.)

A reader writes: 0pt;”>It’s the “John Rocker” incident of the this decade, but it’s getting surprisingly little play outside of Northern California.

Bay Area sportscaster Larry Krueger made the above-referenced comments about Latino baseball players with low batting averages and on-base percentages due to poor judgment about the strike zone.

Felipe Alou, manager of the Giants, and his son Moises have declared an ethnic “no fly” zone over KNBR, the Giants flagship station that employs Krueger – so already the crawling has started, the apologies that aren’t being accepted and the usual sort of thing that inevitably follows an incident like this.

And truth to tell, Krueger’s comments certainly indicate a lack of discretion on his part. He might have made the same point with less inflammatory language. But he also must have the balls of a burglar to say such things in the Bay Area.

But while liberals had a field day with Rocker, I imagine that the relative obscurity about this story is the ultra-liberal SF Bay Area deciding “This doesn’t happen in OUR family” and waiting for the story to go away. Then too, Rocker was a ballplayer and Krueger is himself a member of the media. The news media inevitably protects its own to a greater extent than it protects those whom they cover.

And like Rocker’s comments, Krueger’s have more than a little grain of truth to them. I don’t think that there’s much doubt that if one examined the ratio of walks per plate appearances of Latino versus non-Latino ballplayers, you’d see the Latino ballplayers drawing noticeably fewer walks. Observers of the game – in both the Caribbean leagues and the American major leagues – have politely noted this for some time.

It’s said that Latino hitters are free swingers because they are anxious to impress major league scouts with their hitting prowess. The expression is, “You can’t walk your way off the island”.

But I’m not so sure. I imagine that major league scouts are savvy enough to appreciate a smart hitter who displays patience at the plate, draws his share of walks, and fattens his on-base percentage.

I imagine that the reason why Latino ballplayers swing the bat so readily is more due to the flamboyance with which Latino culture displays itself. Manny Sanguillen, a very good-hitting All Star catcher for the Pirates during the 1970’s, was once asked why he ALWAYS swung at the first pitch, and he replied happily, “Because it makes me feel good”.

Obviously, there have been some great Latino bad-ball hitters (Roberto Clemente possibly being the best example from the past), just as there have been some great non-Latino bad-ball hitters (Yogi Berra).

But mediocre hitters of all backgrounds (there’s a reason why .220 is referred to as the “Mendoza line”; that expression was coined after good-hit, no field shortstop, Mario Mendoza) could probably use a little more patience at home plate.

But I don’t imagine that any of this is going to be discussed intelligently now that the latest auto de fe has started.

* I wanted to link to Garrett Morris doing the “Baseball been bery bery good to me!” character on the old SNL but apparently that’s been expunged from the national memory.

Btw another recent pc-related dust-up: black former Daily Show writer and performer Wyatt Cenac recounted on Marc Maron’s podcast how Jon Stewart attacked him for expressing his discomfort with Stewart’s possibly-too-black-sounding Herman Cain impression. Both the recounted incident and the present concern over it are rather instructive and amusing.

Looking back at Stewart’s Cain impersonation, it’s actually fairly reserved and white-sounding. Ironically, Cenac is on the same page as the Fox News crowd on this issue, though he would never align himself with them.

* Colin Cowherd has pushed the envelope before…I suspect ESPN wanted to tarnish his image because he is leaving them behind. They gave him the rope to hang himself on Friday. He made the statement about Dominicans on Thursday, but he did himself in on Friday trying to explain his statement and backing up his comment on Dominicans with additional hate facts to prove his comments about Dominicans was true…ESPN encouraged him to try and explain his statement , knowing it would only make him look worse…instead of apologizing ESPN encouraged him to explain himself in public, knowing that speaking facts on the radio today will end your career.

Being fired for “racist” comments will not help his ratings at FOX. ESPN was clever to destroy Colin’s reputation a week after he announced he was leaving ESPN, he should have left the next day. ESPN accomplished two goals, putting fear into anyone who tries to leave for Fox and they gain some pokey man points to boost their liberal cred amongst the leftists media, further punishing those who may go against the narrative. The executive at ESPN get off on demonstrating the power they have over the talent.

* Mike Ditka once said Redskin defensive end Dexter Manley had the IQ of a grapefruit. People laughed back then because Manley was obviously stupid. It turned out it he literally could not read. The thing of it is he graduated from high school and played football at Oklahoma State.

Baseball has never pretended its players were college athletes or even high school graduates. The ironic thing is very few baseball players are dominant when they first arrive in the major leagues. It takes seasoning and experience before they start winning batting titles or Cy Young awards.

* Cowherd mostly towed the leftist PC line.

He was particularly firm in holding the inflexible position of the homosexualists. He was a vocal member of the chorus at ESPN shouting down the Indiana religious freedom law, (and ultimately using the hint of potential boycott of the NCAA basketball tournament as leverage to pressure the governor to disappear the law.)

He is reaping the whirlwind. May it teach him a lesson.

* I doubt that the people listening to sports radio care about any of this. Normal people know that ESPN is run by hooting lunatics. Every few months they fire someone for heresy. If you think ESPN is playing some sort of long game then you have not been paying attention. This is just another day at the asylum.

* Regarding Pinebush. People are so naive. A Jewish run school district gets sued for “antisemitism” and some Jews get awarded $4 million.

And of course, no one at Pinebush was in on it. Just Jews hating other Jews.

No wonder the insurance company refused to pay.

* I dunno if baseball is just fast-twitch theater. There are players who exhibit massive skill but seem brain dead in all other areas. Besides Guerrero, there’s Jose Canseco, Lenny Dykstra, and Mark McGwire. And yeah, having great eyesight like Ted Williams helps, in hitting.

But there seems a whole bunch of guys who live by deception, in catching, pitching, and average hitting. Rod Carew, the late Tony Gwynn, Phil Niekro, all come to mind.

I think the key is, that players with higher IQs can compensate for the erosion of physical ability in the late twenties and early thirties, prolonging careers and making enormous amounts of money. Some of that is steroids, sure. Others are deceptive pitches, massive charts on player tendencies, experience judging balls in various stadiums at various times of day, and so on. Certainly coaching/managing has embraced huge shifts defensively, meaning lots of stat interpretation. Shifts are not anything new, supposedly there were shifts in the 1870s, though they vary in frequency over the decades.

Certainly top flight performers like Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner, Mike Trout, and Albert Pujols all behave like knowing opponents tendencies is important because they all cop to carrying around notebooks jotting said tendencies down after games.

* But Howard Cosell kept his job with MNF after using “little monkey” to refer to individual black players after each completed plays requiring speed and evasiveness. Three times over the course of that show, he used the expression. For one, the last, he apologized as the heat in the kitchen had grown hot. If HC hadn’t been a liberal Jew, wonder if he’d have kept his job.

* ESPN gives courage award to a man who has no use for his balls but fires a man who has use of his balls.

What a world we live in.

* Dominicans say stuff like this about Haitians all the time.

* Can you blame them? What people need to feel better about themselves is to have somebody who is even more screwed up than they are close by for reinforcing confidence. Haitians fit that bill. You can see it from space, literally. I won’t begrudge the Dominicans their disdain, while still not begrudging Americans their disdain for Dominicans.

* Dominican Republic and Haiti are the only two countries on that tiny little island. You can see why they’d be obsessed with each other. Probably they had lots of Haitians screwing things up and decided to deport them.

* Dominicans in the DR discriminate against Black Haitian bodies, so Colin Cowherd should be hailed as a hero by Social Justice Warriors and the Black lives matter movement for putting out negative hate stats on those evil colorist Dominicans.

* Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul, who’s of Haitian ancestry, blew off an index finger with fireworks on July 4th.

* A sports writer buddy relayed a story about pedro to me.pedro was bragging about a starlet he had bedded the night before as part of a three way with another guy.he started going into how while they were fooling around the guy started blowing him.my sportswriter buddy was surprised because he had always thought him to be a Mas macho womanizer and said “wow pedro I can’t believe you’re gay!” to which Guerrero responded “woa woa woa I’m not gay, I said he was sucking my dick.”

* That’s not an example of stupidity but the Latin American “who, whom” concept of sexuality.

* Hunter Thompson described a similar attitude among Hell’s Angels in his book about them. They didn’t regard being paid to accept oral sex from homosexuals as any reflection on their heterosexuality. hHe quotes one as saying, “The day they can call me queer is when I let one of these f—s suck on me for less than a tenner.”