Luke Scott

[dkphxf]

Still not buying it:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-05-04/sports/bal-sportsblitz-scott-obama0504_1_president-barack-obama-birth-certificate-orioles

And, yes, I'm the same guy who said about Rashard Mendenhall that I don't care at all what athletes say about current events. But Scott's worldview has come out in larger profiles, both Dave Brown's piece at Yahoo and the ESPN.com story that triggered this thread. I suppose that has helped draw me in a little more, much like the John Rocker SI piece a decade ago.

Why should anybody care about what Luke Scott says ... The fact that he is an athlete in no way distinguishes him from any other moron birther.

This crap will go away when our brethren in the media stop enabling it by asking these clowns about it. Luke Scott has the right to be an idiot. He doesn't have the unfettered right to spread his idiocy, and we shouldn't be helping him do it.

Still not buying it:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-05-04/sports/bal-sportsblitz-scott-obama0504_1_president-barack-obama-birth-certificate-orioles

And, yes, I'm the same guy who said about Rashard Mendenhall that I don't care at all what athletes say about current events. But Scott's worldview has come out in larger profiles, both Dave Brown's piece at Yahoo and the ESPN.com story that triggered this thread. I suppose that has helped draw me in a little more, much like the John Rocker SI piece a decade ago.

Why should anybody care about what Luke Scott says ... The fact that he is an athlete in no way distinguishes him from any other moron birther.

This crap will go away when our brethren in the media stop enabling it by asking these clowns about it. Luke Scott has the right to be an idiot. He doesn't have the unfettered right to spread his idiocy, and we shouldn't be helping him do it.

I think this is probably a pretty good discussion for the Journalism Board at some point.

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

 

[floridanewbie31]

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

 

[YGBFKM]

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

 

[BillyT]

From Peter Gammons' Twitter account 3-days ago

Luke Scott's ops plus is now double his IQ

Not for nothing but Gammons went to lily-white Groton and then all-white North Carolina prior to it being integrated in 1965. Say what you want about Scott but he's more racially tolerant than Gammons was at the same age. Let's hear him call out former colleague Dan Shaughnessey for his racism before throwing rocks at easy target Scott and then I'll give him credence.

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.

 

[CarltonBanks]

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.

 

[sgreenwell]

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.