Moneyball - Michael Lewis [140]
For the most part, the city of Toronto appreciated the change. But even there, in that gentle and decent place, was that noisome sound—the miserable squeaks of protest from the Club’s Women’s Auxiliary. One morning during the 2003 season, Toronto woke up to a front-page story in the Toronto Star that raised alarming questions about the new Blue Jays. “The White Jays?” it was called. The headline, along with the mug shots of the players, read: “In a city of so many multicultural faces, Toronto’s baseball team is the whitest in the league. Why?” The baseball writer behind the article, Geoff Baker, had made his own little study. He’d found that there were ten nonwhite players on the average big league twenty-five-man roster and that, after Ricciardi’s wheeling and dealing, the new Jays had only six. The new GM seemed to be systematically trading for lower-priced white guys. How sad, how regrettable, in a city as famous for its diversity as Toronto, that the Blue Jays no longer represented it. “Ricciardi is at a loss to explain the numbers as anything beyond coincidence,” wrote Baker, who was not similarly at a loss. He found an explanation in the way J. P. Ricciardi ran a baseball team.
It was an intriguing line of attack, but with a tactical weakness. By its very nature, it demanded a response from outside the Club. (That, in the end, is the Club’s Achilles heel. It can never fully escape the larger culture that supports it.) Letters poured into the Star, the Star’s ombudsman was called in to apologize for the package, and other newspapers took the piece to heart. The National Post ran a withering editorial that pointed out that the Jays’ promotional campaign featured two players, Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells, both black. That Toronto was 8 percent black and 2 percent Latino, its baseball team was 12 percent black and 12 percent Latino, and so, taken literally, the article made the case for reducing the number of racial minorities in Blue Jays’ uniforms. That it was grotesque to make racial generalizations based on a couple of moves. Wrote the Post: “The story, shot through as it was with vague hints of racism, comprised a smear job on a baseball team with no other agenda than to win games and please its fans.”
But where the anger climaxed was in the Blue Jays clubhouse: the players were ticked off. You see, they were laboring under the impression they’d been selected for their ability to play baseball, not their skin color. Carlos Delgado told the Toronto Sun, “It was the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t make any sense. You don’t see anybody writing anything about the Maple Leafs not having a black guy or the Raptors having 90 percent black players. It [race] has nothing to do with it. We don’t have any kind of problem in the clubhouse and we don’t need that shit.”
Enter, stage right, Richard Griffin, a second baseball writer on the Toronto Star. Griffin was another old baseball guy who had been on Ricciardi’s case from the start. Relentless in his ire for the new regime, and their new methods, he never missed a chance to point out where they were going wrong. Now he explained patiently to the Star’s readers that they