Dorks And Losers

Sixty years ago, Jackie Robin­son became the first black player in Major League Base­ball his­tory. He broke the color bar­rier and started a chain reac­tion that resulted in racial sports integration.

MLB is hon­ored Robin­son this past week­end, and many base­ball play­ers have jumped at the chance of wear­ing No. 42 to per­son­ally honor the hero. Many base­ball colum­nists have talked about this in many vari­eties from the dilu­tion of the honor with so many play­ers wear­ing No. 42 to the con­cern of so few black play­ers in pro­fes­sional base­ball. Is this low num­ber destroy­ing Jackie’s legacy?

But accord­ing to these fig­ures, African-Americans com­prised of only 8% of all major league base­ball play­ers. A racial divide seems more like a black hole.

But is 8% really a prob­lem? It is for base­ball because the tal­ent then has to come from else­where. It really isn’t for blacks because there are other sports out­lets like bas­ket­ball and foot­ball. Racial dis­crim­i­na­tion isn’t much of an issue in sports as much as it was when Jackie played.

Jackie Robin­son should not only be remem­bered for open­ing the door for blacks in base­ball. He should be remem­bered for open­ing the door to all sports for all non-white races. And I don’t think he would be sad to see base­ball only 8% full of blacks if he saw Wade and Shaq win last year’s NBA Final or LaDain­ian Tom­lin­son score 31 times.
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I’m still amused by this com­ment one my pro­fes­sors said in class. He was describ­ing how the cur­rent two party poli­cal sys­tem in Amer­ica sucks. He said hav­ing to choose between two can­di­dates who are, to some degree, the “same” can­di­date is stu­pid, after com­par­ing and con­trast­ing their ideologies.

“Great. Who were you going to vote for. Tweedly-dumb and tweedly-Kerry.”

Fun stuff…
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*** 9:42 AM Update ***

Funny video of a fan throw­ing a pizza at another fan. Read the story.

It’s pretty funny lis­ten­ing to the com­men­ta­tors laugh and try to inves­ti­gate what happened.

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