Luke Scott

[/crossthread] http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/82242/

 

I've done a number of features on Luke Scott, had lunch with him, talked with him extensively. He's weird no doubt. He's also one of the nicest athletes I've ever dealt with. FWIW, Im African-American.....don't know if that means anything, though

 

It used to be I couldn't stand Luke Scott, then he started hitting. My fantasy team needs all the help it can get.

 

You're going to damn a guy for his age and where he went to school 46 years ago.

I have been reading him and Shaughnessy since 1975, and I never got the impression they were racists.

Am I a racist because I went to a high school in Rhode Island that had 1,000 white kids, three Black kids, two Hispanic kids and two Jewish kids?

Of course, I am one of the few folks who will come out and say I *like* Sahughnessy.

 

Why does Mendenhall get savaged for his Tweets, but Luke Scott is just "one of the boys?" Should the public reaction to these incidents be similar? I just don't get it.

Throwing banana chips, however, is pretty funny. Even if it IS completely ignorant.

 

Difference in scale, timing and topicality. Mendenhall decided to go with the "9/11 is an inside job" and "it's wrong to kill" stuff in the same week a large portion of the U.S. was wooping it up about Osama being killed. Scott was just being a generic racist. If the profile had been published during a slower news cycle, I imagine a bigger deal would have been made of it. (In an episode this week, either Colbert or Stewart noted that it was the perfect time to announce bad news, like John Ensign announcing his resignation.)

I do think that baseball players generally get less crap for racist remarks though because of how the sport developed. Integration was a long, long time ago, but you've had the rise of the (mostly) upper-class Legion and club teams, and the flight of the game from the inner cities in favor of basketball and football.