Are Cubs fans racist?

[whitesoxfan101]

This is not a question I am posing, howver these 2 articles sure as hell try and make it seem like that's the case.

 

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/nl...ker-focus_x.htm

 

Baker endures as Cubs' expectations fall short

Updated 8/21/2006 4:49 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions | Subscribe to stories like this

 

Dusty Baker sits with his son Darren before the Cubs played the Cardinals this past weekend. Darren returns to his home with his mother once games start so as to not expose the family to hostile fans at Wrigley Field.

 

TALE OF WOES

 

Lowlights for the Cubs in the nearly three years since Steve Bartman tried to catch a foul ball in the 2003 National League Championship Series:

 

Record: 221-226 (.494)

So long, Sammy: Slugger Sammy Sosa, the Cubs' leader in career home runs, leaves the ballpark during the last game of the 2004 season, his last act with the team before being traded in the offseason.

No mas Nomar: After acquiring Nomar Garciaparra at the 2004 trade deadline from Boston, the shortstop signs a one-year contract in the offseason but plays in only 62 games in 2005 because of injuries. He hit .289 with 13 homers and 50 RBI in 1 1/2 seasons as a Cub.

Derrek downer: First baseman Derrek Lee, who finished third in MVP voting in 2005, breaks his wrist on April 21. He returns for a month on June 25 before going back on the disabled list with wrist pain.

Missing Wood and Prior: Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, each on the DL six times, are currently injured and expected to miss the rest of the season. Since 2003, Wood is 12-15 with 36 starts and a 3.90 ERA. Prior is 18-17 with 57 starts and a 4.27 ERA.

 

Source: USA TODAY research

 

Dusty Baker not only has battled disappointed Cubs fans this year, but also he's taken on umpires such as Ed Montague.

 

By Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker, sitting in his Wrigley Field office, slowly opens a letter, and cringes.

It begins with a nasty racial epithet, but Baker keeps reading. He finishes the letter, slowly crumbles it in a ball and tosses it in the trash bin. Oh well, he says, at least they're getting friendlier. This one didn't include a death threat.

 

"It's not easy, I ain't lying," says Baker, in the final season of a four-year contract, "but come on, dude, I'm not going to let them beat me up.

 

"I was already strong and tough when I got here. Now, I'm stronger and tougher. They aren't going to run me out of town."

 

The racist letters have come as regularly as the boos this season at the corner of Clark and Addison, part of the dramatic changes at Wrigleyville since Steve Bartman tried to catch that foul ball in the 2003 National League Champion Series.

 

No longer are the Cubs affectionately known as the "Lovable Losers." They are treated with the same disdain as any other underachieving major-market team.

 

"The bar got raised, but that's not a bad thing," Cubs general manager Jim Hendry says. "If we had won (the World Series) in 2003, it probably would have changed our lives forever. These last two seasons would have been easier to endure."

 

The Cubs, just five outs from reaching the 2003 World Series, instead lost Games 6 and 7 in the National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins.

 

Chicago had a four-game wild-card lead in 2004 with eight games remaining, but missed the playoffs. They haven't been close since.

 

Former Cubs center fielder Corey Patterson and former reliever LaTroy Hawkins last year received similar abuse to what Baker is getting. Cubs right fielder Jacque Jones, who had a baseball thrown at him during a game, recently got a threatening early-morning phone call.

 

Hawkins, now with the Baltimore Orioles, had Major League Baseball security open much of his mail last season when he was with the Cubs. He was stunned by the hatred.

 

"I thought that stuff was over 30 years ago," says Hawkins, who grew up in nearby Gary, Ind. "I had never been exposed to it. ... I couldn't believe people were dropping the 'n-word' on me. People calling your mother a raccoon or you a porch monkey. You can only take so much abuse until you fight back.

 

"The same thing happening to me is happening to Jacque. To have people threatening to harm us over baseball games just doesn't make sense."

 

No excuses, losing stinks

 

The Cubs finished 21 games behind the St. Louis Cardinals last year. At 53-70, the Cubs have the majors' fourth-worst record.

 

"When the Red Sox won the (2004) World Series, everyone just assumed it was our turn," Cubs closer Ryan Dempster says. "People got pretty upset and frustrated with us when the White Sox won the ('05) World Series.

 

"You hate to say this, but sometimes it's a whole lot easier to play on the road."

 

Patterson, now performing the way the Cubs long envisioned but doing it in Baltimore, says: "There's only so much you can take there. You have the manager and general manager saying, "Don't worry about it,' but unless you're going through it personally, how can you not worry about it? You can only be so strong, so tough."

 

The fans largely have been forgiving of Hendry and most of the players. It's Baker who takes the brunt of criticism. He's a three-time National League manager of the year. He was supposed to be the savior.

 

"The expectations were high when Dusty got here, but after 2003, they became monumental," says veteran newsman George Ofman of WSCR-AM, a Chicago all-sports radio station that has been highly critical of Baker. "It's not like Cubs fans aren't used to losing, but this time, they're angrier because they expected more.

 

"If the Cubs brought him back, the fans here would be absolutely livid."

 

The Cubs have been without first baseman Derrek Lee for all but 34 games this season. Starters Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, combined, have won two games. Baker has used 13 starters, including seven rookies who have made more than one-third of the Cubs' starts.

 

Despite the rash of injuries, Hendry has yet to determine whether Baker and his coaching staff will be back.

 

"I don't play the excuse game. Nobody cares about excuses," Hendry says. "But Dusty shouldn't be sharing a higher percentage of the blame than anyone else. In reality, there is enough blame for all of us. I was the one who brought Dusty here. I have to bear the responsibility of the operations.

 

"If we're not winning when my contract is up (after the 2008 season), I should get whacked myself."

 

Personally tough on Baker

 

Melissa Baker, married to Dusty for 12 years, no longer attends home games. Darren, their 7-year-old son, will occasionally tag along with his dad before games.

 

But once the game starts, his mom takes him back to their two-bedroom condo and they watch the game on TV.

 

"The true fans have been great, but it's changed there and become hostile," she says. "I can't subject a 7-year-old to people booing his dad or hearing that kind of language. You want him to go somewhere where there's no negativity.

 

"But you can't always protect him. Someone mentioned to him at the park the other day, 'I heard that your dad will be fired.' He has no clue."

 

She, too, worries about her husband. She changed the home phone number. Darrin's voice has been taken off the manager's voice mail. She pleads with him to take precautions, imploring him to tell MLB security each time he receives threatening letters.

 

"Nobody wants to hear about race, but unless you're a minority, you can sympathize, but you can't relate," says Baker's wife, of Philippine descent. "It's shocking that these things still go on. It's just a baseball game, but there's so much hostility.

 

"Dusty has accepted it. He played in the South and understands. But when we are gone, and he's in town by himself, I always ask him to be sure that he's with someone when he goes out.

 

"I don't want him out by himself," she says.

 

Don Baylor, who managed the Cubs from 2000-'02, remembers the hatred. He, too, was subjected to racist letters, just not to the extent that Baker is facing.

 

"I've talked to Dusty, and he's suffering," Baylor says. "It's a tough place to play, a tough place to manage. It's like they bring that hatred to the ballpark.

 

"They say that Cubs fans are great. Define that for me. Is that throwing things on the field, showing disdain for your players? Is that your definition?

 

"When does it end?"

 

Hendry says he will wait until the end of the season and decide the manager's fate by the time Baker heads home to San Francisco for the winter.

 

Baker, 57, who has more victories than all but three active managers, realizes he'll also have a choice at the season's conclusion. Even if the Cubs offer an extension, he can decline and see whether an opening arises in Seattle or elsewhere. Yet, he would love to stay and take care of some unfinished business.

 

"It hasn't been easy, but I've been through this before," Baker says.

 

"Hopefully, this is just a temporary setback. I'm not going to let others control your self-esteem and outlook of life. How things go on a job shouldn't change who you are, and what you are.

 

"I'll get back on a roll. Count on it."

 

That was on Monday, and now today we have this:

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14491396/

 

Baker's fate now about race, not competency

But racist hate mail could save Cubs manager's job despite terrible year

 

Ben Margot / AP file

Dusty Baker has been blamed by some fans for ruining the Cubs, and has received racist letter from fans voicing their displeasure.

View related photos

 

COMMENTARY

By Bob Cook

MSNBC contributor

Updated: 11:12 a.m. CT Aug 24, 2006

 

Despite the image of Wrigley Field as the "Friendly Confines," not every fan is happy just to soak up the sun and the Old Style while watching the Chicago Cubs do whatever they might do. Anyone can have a bad century, as the late Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse once said, but not anyone can take sitting through it.

 

After all, the wrath of angry Cubs fans launched what still ranks as the ultimate managerial meltdown, Cubs skipper Lee Elia’s early-season, post-game X-rated rant in 1983. That’s the one in which he said — well, yelled really — 85 percent of the bleepin’ world is working, while the other 15 percent showed up to Wrigley, a place he characterized not as the Friendly Confines, but a bleepin’ playground for the bleepbleepers.

 

Except he didn’t say bleep, of course.

 

So managers feeling the heat, other than during July day games, is nothing new in Cubdom. But it has taken a disturbing turn recently, in that race is being brought into the equation.

 

Cubs manager Dusty Baker recently presented some, ahem, fan mail to a visiting USA Today reporter, including notes strewn with racial epithets, as evidence some Cubs fans are going over the edge as they grow surly and restless over a 98th straight championship-free year.

 

Monday’s USA Today story also noted current and former black Cubs players said they got racist notes from fans, too — as did Don Baylor, the Cubs’ first-ever black manager, and Baker’s immediate predecessor.

 

It should be shocking that in an age where presumably we all should know better, there’s a breed of fan taking pains to blame Baker’s skin color, and not his ability or the talent he’s been provided or any defensible reason, for the Cubs clunking from one game away from the World Series in 2003 to one of the worst teams in the major leagues in 2006.

 

Or maybe it shouldn’t be shocking. After all, as Mel Gibson taught us, a stressful situation can cause anyone’s inner racist to surface.

 

Cubs fans are most certainly feeling stressed, what with the growing realization that they were supposed to be Episode One of the end-of-your-bad-century trilogy, followed by the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox, and that not even George Lucas can make that Episode One appear out of order. And that the Cubs lost not because some bespectacled, headphones-wearing fan tried to catch a foul ball at a key moment, but because the team unraveled after his ill-fated attempt, and the manager (Baker) was ill-equipped to stop it.

 

And that not only hasn’t Baker stopped the unraveling, but he’s contributed to it by, for example, running phenom pitchers Kerry Wood and Mark Prior into the ground. And that, by extension, the whole Cubs front-office, protected by perpetual sellouts at Wrigley, has let the club go to seed, starting by not firing Baker. And that, by further extension, the Billy Goat Tavern — from whence came the infamous Curse of the Goat — is an overrated greasy spoon trading on its fame from a Saturday Night Live routine only those over 50 could have seen the first time around, and suckering Cubs fans to visit it as some sort of shrine even though it’s responsible for 61 straight pennant-free seasons.

 

(Well, Cubs fans haven’t gotten to that point yet, but they should.)

 

Yet in this sad-sack way, Baker is no different than just about any other Cubs manager in the last century. Except that, other than Baylor, he’s not white. As a teammate of Hank Aaron when he passed Babe Ruth’s all-time home record, Baker saw racism from fans who did not want to see a black man succeed. Right now he’s seeing racism from fans who blame a black man for their team’s failure.

 

Sadly, these phenomena are familiar to any athlete who is not white and American-born. Let’s put it this way — given how Philadelphia treated Dick Allen in the 1960s, there are articles appearing THIS SEASON as to whether the city is ready, for the first time, to accept a black superstar on the Phillies, in the person of Ryan Howard.

 

It’s foolish to paint all Cubs fans as complicit in this racism — that would be engaging in knee-jerk stereotyping as well. Still, Cubs fans feel the need to defend themselves on their own message boards — as well as pointing out that Baker isn’t shy about racial issues himself.

 

In 2003, Baker already was in trouble when he got some heat, no pun intended, for his explanation straight out of the Jimmy the Greek School of Anthropology as to why blacks and Hispanics were well-equipped to play day baseball: "It's easier for most Latin guys and it's easier for most minority people because most of us come from heat. You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. ... We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat?"

 

And in the wake of Baker’s comments to USA Today, fans on various Cubs message boards have noted, without using outwardly racist language, that this is not the first time Baker has shared with reporters that he gets racist letters — that, in fact, Baker has a knack for doing this when it appears his Cubs career is in trouble. (Certainly, Baker has to be worried that his reputation has taken a huge hit as a Cub, even factoring for whatever benefit of the doubt he would get for managing much of the year without two of his top pitchers, Wood and Prior, and his top hitter, Derrek Lee, because of their injuries.)

 

Baker himself, after the USA Today appeared, vouched for the relative goodness of Cubs fans, saying that he got more and worse racist hate mail in his previous managing stop, San Francisco.

 

But there’s no point in defining which city, or which fans, are more racist than others. The sad fact is, a group of idiots has succeeded in making the question about whether the Cubs should retain Baker for next year one about race, and not about competency. And by doing so, they’ve undermined their own, defensible message — that Dusty Baker has done a lousy job as the Cubs’ manager, and that the Cubs front office should start trying to win more than once a century.

 

I think it's quite an....interesting move for the national media to blame the Cubs racist fans for Dusty being under fire rather than the fact he's a bad manager for a bad team.

[Gene Honda Civic]

It's a well known fact that Cubs fans love Survivor

[whitesoxfan101]

It's a well known fact that Cubs fans love Survivor

 

Band or Show?

[hammerhead johnson]

Baker himself, after the USA Today appeared, vouched for the relative goodness of Cubs fans, saying that he got more and worse racist hate mail in his previous managing stop, San Francisco.

 

Racist hippies? Ain't that some spiff.

[Flash Tizzle]

That'd be deliciously ironic if all the criticism from Cub fans, in hopes of pushing Baker out, actually helped in retaining him.

 

Although I doubt it would factor much. Would Hendry honestly give him an extension because of how it may appear letting him go?

 

Band or Show?

Show. Their new season is featuring groups divided by race.

[Dick Allen]

When I was in Windsor I turned on TSN I believe, its like the Canadian ESPN. They had a story about racist Cubs fans. I guess Jacque Jones has been getting letters and phone calls with racist-like threats. Even at the park, the people are saying nasty things. Sorry I didn't post this earlier, especially for hangar, but I'm sure its nice to know that the truth is being told somewhere, even if it isn't in the US.

[Punch and Judy Garland]

Obviously Cub fans in general terms are not racist but it does stand to reason that the less diverse a group is, the more ethnocentric it shall be. I know Boston is also considered a tough town for blacks, ar at least has been through many accounts from athletes/writers. The biggest factor is the price for these fans. Fans at Wrigley and the Boston Garden have to pay more to attend and if you look at simple socioeconomics its not hard to figure out that this is going to lead to a skewed layering of people. However, there is another big factor that accounts for this since some of the problems have not been at the park, and that is exposure. Teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs are the most popular which bring in the most people so it stands to reason there would be more incidents. I am not surprised that guys like Baker and Jones get hate-mail because race is still a troubling issue in this country whether anyone wants to talk about it or not. That said, I think Dusty is a bad manager independant of his skin color although I feel bad that he would have to endure some of this stuff

[fathom]

All I know is that in the past few years, I haven't seen anyone get as consistently booed as Hawkins, Patterson, and even J. Jones have. Jones was getting booed out of the stadium after about a week of struggling.

[Punch and Judy Garland]

there is no question that the fans have been really hard on them, although its not completely unjustified either. I recall Todd Hundley being dogges really badly but you are right that the boobirds have hit the black players hardest whether thats a coincidence or not

[Felix]

All I know is that in the past few years, I haven't seen anyone get as consistently booed as Hawkins, Patterson, and even J. Jones have. Jones was getting booed out of the stadium after about a week of struggling.

Yankee fans boo A-Rod. Does that mean they have something against latin players?

[Phuck the Cubs]

In 2004, Cubs fans booed Derrek Lee when he got off to a slow start

[RockRaines]

Wow, this isnt booing because they did poorly, this is racist letters and death threats, its a whole different arena.

[whitesoxfan101]

Although I doubt it would factor much. Would Hendry honestly give him an extension because of how it may appear letting him go?

 

OF COURSE HE WOULD!! That's why I think this might be a factor, these are the freaking Cubs. They won't trade guys at peak value because they are afraid they'll piss off the fanbase after all. So I really think the Cubs would keep Baker even if it was only to avoid the muddy situation of how it appeared they let him go.

[Kid Gleason]

If a white player gets booed...is it racism? I didn't think sounds equated racism.

[whitesoxfan101]

If a white player gets booed...is it racism? I didn't think sounds equated racism.

 

Neither did I....I don't agree with the articles actually, however the way they are written make it obvious that they think Dusty is a victim of racism to an extent. Maybe they should realize he's just a really bad manager.

[southsider2k5]

If a white player gets booed...is it racism? I didn't think sounds equated racism.

 

I think the point is that there are a lot of non-white players who end up getting booed, and receieving hate mail, much of it using their race as a derogatory basis. If it keeps being non-white players, when does it become a pattern?