Baltimore: What the Hell?

During the Baltimore riots last week, Buck Showalter said some pretty profound things. To the point that I had to forgive him for being ridiculous about the turf (no one is fond of the turf, Buck. Stop making me feel defensive.) and throwing behind Bautista. I had to respect him for more than having a whole army of basset hounds.

And for being on Seinfeld. 

When the Orioles had to play in an empty stadium because of the rioting, Showalter was asked what advice he would give young Black men living in Baltimore. 

And it was pretty amazing.

"You hear people try to weigh in on things that they really don't know anything about," he said. "I tell guys all the time when they talk about…I've never been black, OK? So I don't know. I can't put myself there. I've never been faced with the challenges that they face. So I understand the emotion, but I can't…It's a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, 'Well, I know what they're feeling. Why don't they do this? Why doesn't somebody do that?' You have never been black, OK, so just slow down a little bit."

Whatever the equivalent of mansplaining for race relations is, Showalter did the opposite. So my feelings about Showalter were complex, to say the least.

And then Baltimore does something completely tone deaf:

Just so we're all aware what's going on here. "Our Birds Matter" is a riff on  "Black Lives Matter" the main slogan for the current activism about deaths of black men at the hands of law enforcement and general systematic racism. "No Baseball. No Peace." is a riff on a lesser known, but still used slogan "No Justice. No Peace." a slogan that may have roots back to the riots in LA after the Rodney King verdict.

So, yeah. These white people co-opted slogans from a movement that is looking for equal rights and justice for African Americans, and made it about them.

Just don't do that.

In other news, Marco Estrada had a rough first (a pitcher who has a habit of giving up homers facing a team that hits homers) but otherwise held the fort while Ubaldo Jimenez continued his weird Houdini act of throwing junk that looks hittable but isn't. As a result, the Jays lost. It sucked.

What doesn't suck? Alexis Brudnicki writes that the Rogers Centre opened it's door to the Canadian National Women's Baseball team for a selection camp for the Pan Am Games. Jays Alumni, including my new favourite broadcaster Duane Ward, were impressed:

"They know how to play the game. It's not that they don't have good arms to throw or that they don't have good bats -- they have that. Now it's just figuring out how to progress and get a lot better. Some of them have been around for a long time and they know the game, and I'm impressed. It's not that they're girls who are baseball players, they're baseball players who just happen to be girls."