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flauntpage · 7 years

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Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson's 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

"I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

On Saturday, Oakland Athletics rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell, a black man, became the first MLB player to kneel during the national anthem. In a moment that faintly echoed Robinson and white teammate Pee Wee Reese's iconic embrace seven decades ago, Mark Canha placed his left hand on Maxwell's shoulder. The game went on. Oakland beat Texas 1-0.

Maxwell spoke eloquently about his reasons for taking a knee. Following his tweets from the weekend, you can see that Donald Trump's fixation on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry rather than national issues like the destruction of Puerto Rico struck a chord with him.

Why did it take so long?

The conservatism that has always held baseball hostage is a short, serviceable answer. It's nothing new. Back when Muhammad Ali was embracing the Nation of Islam, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos were raising their fists in black solidarity at the Olympics, the most meaningful activism among baseball players was economic—the fight to unionize and to earn free agency. Even the leaders of those movements faced backlash from their fellow players, not to mention owners, the media, and the public at large.

In the decades since, we have witnessed the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the imposition of internet filter bubbles, the optimization of soft news—of which sports is a crown jewel—and the deterioration of the American education system. Today, the average citizen cannot readily discern fact from fiction. They revert back to their trusted information troughs that validate their biases and make them feel better, smarter. Baseball players are like extreme versions of this, only with more confidence.

In the company of a few players last year, for example, I mentioned the (once again relevant) Paid Patriotism in Sports investigation led by Republican Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain from Arizona, which revealed that the Department of Defense paid MLB and other major sports leagues millions of dollars to stage many of the boutique military exercises we as players had all become so accustomed to being accessories to, standing at attention with our hands over our hearts along the foul line. One player told me that this was "liberal fake news," and that "John McCain would never do no kinda shit like that."

Baseball may value shut-up-and-play guys more than any other sport. The patron saint of that archetype is Derek Jeter, the most beloved baseball player since Babe Ruth, whose farewell tour was seen by many as excessive. What had he done but win championships? But to celebrate Jeter was to celebrate kicking ass and taking names, the Crash Davis school of never saying the wrong thing (not to be confused with saying the right thing) and only making waves off the field in heterosexual sex scandals that ultimately add girth to the legacy.

Orioles veteran centerfielder Adam Jones is one of the few players to consistently speak out about issues of race, from talking about Freddie Gray's death in 2015 to calling out fans who shouted the N-word at him in Fenway Park last season. A year ago, Jones said that Kaepernick–style protests hadn't made their way to MLB because "baseball is a white man's sport."

Jones was one of just 58 black, African American, or African Canadian players on active rosters for Opening Day this season, according to the 2017 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card. That number doesn't include Maxwell, who was called up from Triple-A later in April, nor several players who were on the DL, but the report still calls attention to "the relatively small and declining percentage of African-American players" in baseball.

It should be noted that Afro-Caribbean players born in the U.S. are not always counted in that group. I am both African and American—my parents' native Cuba was only a few stops on the Atlantic slave trade away from the Alabama of Maxwell's youth—but on the only Jackie Robinson Day in which I was in the Major Leagues (2009), I was not tabbed for that photo opportunity.

The same 2017 report card notes that there are more players of color in the league now than ever before. And the growing Latino presence in MLB creates more racial complexity that is especially hard to follow for people who don't see race and want all this race stuff to go back into the shadows. Many Latino people are racist. Many Latino people deny their own blackness. For every white-passing Latino with less than a quarter of African blood in them who speaks with an alarming NPM (niggas per minute) in public spaces, there is an undeniably African Latino who doesn't believe they're black. The individual desires of people of color to defer participation in "race" chips at the solidarity of the black community as efficiently as racism itself does. This is hard for anthropologists to follow, much less ballplayers.

Black solidarity is difficult to negotiate with a language barrier, and one should understand what might dissuade, for instance, a Venezuelan Afro-Latino from criticizing any aspect of American culture when matters are worse in every sense, including race issues, in their own country. Black people who are well traveled, especially Afro-Latinos who've traveled to many Spanish-speaking countries, eventually come to the glib conclusion quicker than anyone else, that despite our longtime and recently stoked problems here in America, there is perhaps no better place in the world to be black.

Kaepernick's protest spread slowly but surely across the NFL, where African-Americans made up 69.7 percent of players last year. Athletes in the NBA and the WNBA—two more leagues with majority black rosters—have also become fluent in peaceful protest in the last few years. Demographics may have kept the Kaepernick movement from catching on in baseball, but it's important to note that baseball conservatism has many layers.

In baseball, conformism is subconsciously enforced by the martial law of the purpose pitch, and by the ingrained biases of the people in power who make personnel decisions and drive its culture. When you wear your hat a certain way, a coach may say, "Why do you have to be different?" Your hair may irk him, and when you miss the cutoff man, it may be more irksome to him than when the guy who looks more like his son does it. There's the crappy .220 hitter and there's the scrappy .220 hitter, and the formula for who goes to AAA and who stays on as the good clubhouse guy is subjective at best.

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

Three weeks into the NFL season, Colin Kaepernick is still unemployed. NFL insiders have been more reticent to say he's being blackballed than non-insiders like activist Shaun King. While Kaepernick is probably as capable as most starting NFL quarterbacks, he is not in the elite, irreplaceable strata of athletes. This gives the owners who don't sign him (i.e., all the owners) plausible deniability. It complicates the issue of Kaepernick's unemployment.

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

As a player, Bruce Maxwell is even more replaceable than Kaepernick. Though the Oakland A's were swift to defend Maxwell after he kneeled on Saturday, it is important to note that if he were to be blackballed, it would be virtually impossible to prove. To date, Maxwell has proven he is a light-hitting catcher worth about half a win above replacement over the course of a season. Though many ballplayers are late bloomers, Maxwell's 300 at-bats represent a sufficiently large enough sample size for him to slowly fade into journeyman status without a second thought.

But whether he noticed or not, Maxwell's path was eased by other circumstances. The Oakland A's were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs on September 22, though they were never in the race at all, and even sold off their best pitcher at the trade deadline. The length of MLB's season holds that half its teams engage in dozens of meaningless games, such as Saturday's historic, meaningless contest between the Rangers and the Athletics. Maxwell has enjoyed the luxury of relatively low stakes—in baseball terms.

Along those lines, a story:

The morning after my club, the Tampa Bay Rays, beat the Red Sox in the 2008 ALCS, a handful of teammates and I supported then Senator Barack Obama at a rally in Florida. As a rookie, I was "hazed" by being volunteered to introduce the most famous political figure of our generation with a short speech before a capacity crowd at Legends Field. We were criticized for associating the team with a political party, but it was manageable—World Series stakes or not, Tampa is a tiny sports market. At the same time, had there not been several senior teammates with me, I might not have gone to the Obama rally. I might have caved under the pressure of fitting in that Maxwell overcame. And despite a military veteran father of my own, had all of what's happening now been happening in the middle of a playoff race I was in as a rookie, especially in a major market, I would probably not have taken a knee—by myself no less—during the national anthem, either. You don't want to be labeled a "distraction" by the media, and then become one in a superstitious, cliquey clubhouse as a rookie who is a new actor in a championship run that is years in the making. We have yet to see a major baseball star in a major market make a major political engagement. We have yet to see a Kaepernick–grade athlete use the platform of a championship run, with its larger audience. The "distraction" is perhaps entirely superstition, which especially pervades sports, but its effect is real.

My money would have been on Jones to be the first player to take a knee, despite his comments. My number two choice would have been Rays pitcher Chris Archer. But Maxwell was the right guy at the right time. He was born on a military base in Germany. His father is a veteran. For a certain kind of person watching these protests—which many critics have mischaracterized as being about "the flag" or "the troops," instead of racial inequality and police violence—he had the credibility, along with the courage, to do something.

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

"It did take a while in baseball, I think mainly because the other sports that do that are predominantly black," says Archer. "Our sport isn't, so I think the criticism might be a little more harsh. It took somebody really special that had a unique background to take that leap.

"The way he went about it was totally, I think, as respectful as possible, just letting everybody know that this doesn't have anything to do with the military, first and foremost, noting that he has family members that are in the military. It's a little bit tougher for baseball players to make that leap, but I think he was the right person to do it."

What Happens Now

Maxwell was cheered by the home Oakland crowd in his first at-bat since kneeling, a line-out to left field. In Mariners veteran Felix Hernandez, he was not forced to face the kind of (white, surly) pitcher one might expect to throw at a guy to send a political message, though it's not at all implausible a pitcher of Felix Hernandez's background could have thrown that purpose pitch "for America" after reading a tea party blog during pregame.

In the last week of the season, more teams will be eliminated (including the Rays), and their players will officially have no distraction superstition as a deterrent. For these players, there will be fewer games after which to face reporters. Here is what Archer told me in a text message: "What [Maxwell] did was tasteful & respectful to all parties. I wouldn't be surprised if more guys start to follow suit."

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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celticnoise · 7 years

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So time to have a look at tonight’s opponent’s Anderlecht or R.S.C. Anderlecht to give them their full name.

The R.S.C. stands for Royal Sporting Club by the way.

They are the champions of Belgium of course, hence their Champions League participation, though we’ll get into their most recent form later.

So they were founded in 1908 on the 27th of May as Sporting Club Anderlechtois after football lover Charles Roos (not to be confused with the famous American economist of the same name) organised 13 of his colleagues all to pitch in to help him buy a football.

That’s right just a football.

I guess they must have been pretty expensive back then.

I actually tracked down all of the original investor’s names online but I doubt you’d be very interested in knowing them although two of them were the wonderfully titled Camille de Cuyper and Guillaume Vandenhoof.

They won their first match in what could only be described as a thrilling 11-8 victory against Institut Saint-Georges. In those early days, they actually had something in common with Celtic in that they were playing close to a cemetery.

In 1909 they applied to join the official Belgian league and started off in Division 3 of the provincial football set-up … you know, the way new clubs are meant to.

Roos handed over the reigns as chairman to Theo Verbeeck a year later after convincing wealthy local businessman Emile Versé to invest and in doing so help them purchase their first football field in Verheyden street.

Versé subsequently became their honorary chairman.

The precocious Verbeeck was only 23 years of age when he assumed responsibility and helped guide the club up through the leagues and into the national level of competition and as their popularity off the pitch increased they moved to their first proper stadium in Astrid Park which they christened after the previously mentioned benefactor, Stade Emile Versé. They play there to this day though it was renamed the Constant Vanden Stock Stadium in 1983 after renovations, taking the name of their then chairman.

Sylva Brébart took over as the club’s first official manager for the 1920-21 season and in his first term in charge guided Anderlecht to the top flight of Belgian football for the first time via a play-off victory over RFC Liège.

Brebart was replaced as manager the following year by Englishman Charles Bunyan Sr. who had played for many years in English football before moving to Belgium where he briefly managed the national team before moving into a coaching role at Anderlecht and subsequently taking over as manager.

Unfortunately, he passed away a short time later and was replaced by his own son Charles Bunyan Jr. who had previously played for Chelsea.

Over a ten-year period, the club would bounce between the first and second tiers of Belgian club football being relegated to the second tier on four occasions.

In 1933 they officially changed their name from the aforementioned Sporting Club Anderlechtois by adding the Royal to the start and subsequently upon gaining promotion back to the top flight of their domestic league in 1935. They have never been relegated again since.

They have won the Belgian First Division a record 34 times (a mammoth 20 more than nearest competitor Club Brugge on 14 wins) along with 9 Belgian National Cups, 1 Belgian League Cup (now defunct) and 13 Belgian Super Cups.

They have also won ten out of the last 18 Belgian League Championships.

Safe to say they are historically, and by some distance, the most successful club in Belgian football.

That success has not only been confined to domestic football though.

On the continent, they have been pretty successful too, having won the Cup Winners Cup in 1976 and 1978 along with the Super Cup in both of those years as well as the UEFA Cup in 1983. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Their thrilling 1983 UEFA Cup win saw them score 25 goals in 12 matches as they took the scalps of FC Porto and Valencia en route to defeating Benfica 2-1 over two legs in the final. The competition was very different back then with the favourites not always more than likely to originate from a handful of Europe’s larger countries as is the case now. Just to press home how different it was back then, Rangers eliminated Borussia Dortmund in the first round and Dundee Utd reached the quarter-finals.

Anderlecht has also finished runners-up in four other major European finals with their best results in the European Cup seeing them reach the semi-finals in 1982 & 1986.

This is their 12th Champions League Group stage appearance.

Despite finishing in 3rd spot on multiple occasions they have never reached the last 16 though they have made the second group stage – back in 2000 /2001 – which was later removed from the competition.

They have the rather dubious distinction of also having suffered, like ourselves, a 5-0 home hammering against PSG in the group stages who trounced them by that very same scoreline on the 23 October 2013.

We’ve met them before in the Champions League of course.

Way back on the 21st of October 2003 we lost 1-0 to them on their home ground despite having a one-man advantage for most of the game when captain Glen De Boeck was sent off for the home side on 25 mins for a late challenge on John Hartson.

Celtic were terrible that night, looking disjointed and flat despite their numerical supremacy and went down to a 72-minute strike from Aruna Dindane who’s time wasting and theatrics in the wake of the goal made him a bit of a panto villain amongst the home support upon the return fixture.

In the said return we swept Anderlecht aside thanks to three goals in the first 29 mins.

Not wanting a repeat of the frustrating night in Brussels suffered two weeks previously manager Martin O’Neill switched from the 3-5-2 line-up deployed over there to a more attack-minded 4-4-2 which saw Didier Agathe starting in his more usual wing back position. Jackie McNamara had a great night on the other side and young Liam Miller scored a fantastic goal, which was sandwiched in between headers from Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton, and looked like he would go onto great things in the hoops.

Alas, he signed for Man Utd and was pretty much never seen again.

Dindane of all people pulled one back 14 mins from the end for Anderlecht but it was no more than a consolation goal.

Anyway, all of that is in that past.

To the present or last season at least.

They won their league championship last term losing only 6 from 40 league matches, winning 24 and scoring 81 goals in the process with 36 conceded. They failed to qualify for the Champions League group stages last term but did make it to the Europa League quarter-finals where they were eliminated 3-2 on aggregate by eventual winners Manchester Utd.

Indeed it took Utd until extra time in the second and home leg in order to secure their place in the semis.

In seven home games in the Europa League last season they won five, drew one and lost only one scoring 18 goals along the way and hammering Mainz of Germany 6-1, as well as defeating Zenit St. Petersburg (2-0) and drawing with Manchester Utd (1-1). Their top goal scorer was Polish internationalist Lukasz Teodorczyk who scored 30 in all competitions.

Needless to say, he’s their one to watch.

This term has been a total mess in comparison.

Coach René Weiler was sacked despite last season’s title success, Europa League run and starting off this term by winning the Belgian Super Cup 2-1 against Zulte Waregem.

From 8 domestic league matches so far they have won three, drawn three and lost two and sit seventh in the league with 12 points, 9 points behind leaders Club Brugge. They have scored 10 goals but have also conceded the same number. So it’s pretty clear where their main problem lies.

They had also been humbled 3-0 in Germany in their first Champions League group match of the season against Bayern Munich.

But let’s be honest that result if of little consequence.

Far better teams than Anderlecht will go there and be taken apart this season.

Weiler’s rather harsh dismissal came only a week ago yesterday on the morning of the 18th of September.

Two days before it they had drawn 2-2 away with Kortrijk.

Coach Nicolas Frutos is now in charge on a caretaker basis. He’s overseen a 1-0 cup win away to second division Westerlo and a 2-1 league win away to Waasland-Beveren who sit one place below Anderlecht in the league and by all accounts were pretty wasteful in front of goal against them on Saturday evening.

Over the summer they lost Ghanian internationalist winger Frank Acheampong on a six-month loan to Tianjin TEDA F.C. of the Chinese Super League and veteran Dutch centre-back Bram Nuytinck to Udinese. Sven Kums, the attacking Belgian midfielder who clocked up no appearances for Watford last season but did play 29 games on loan at Udinese and Serbian internationalist defender Uroš Spaji? have arrived in their place.

Senegalese internationalist centre-back Kara Mbodji has also not been seen much of recently after last season speculation linked him with a move to Leicester City. He claimed he was scared to leave his house after his own fans labelled him a ‘monkey’ as a result of his desire for a transfer to the ‘promised land’ of the English Premier League.

Undoubtedly though their biggest loss from last season’s successful campaign was the 20-year-old Belgian internationalist midfielder Youri Tielemans who left in a £19 million deal to Monaco. Tielmans played 185 times for Anderlecht, 36 of them in Europe, and scored 35 goals from the centre of the park.

As a result, he became one of European football’s most coveted talents.

Without him, Anderlecht looks a shadow of the side from 2016/17.

Let’s hope that theme continues tomorrow and that we can step up to the plate and claim a rare Champions League away victory as well as three precious points.

We only have one of those from 27 previous goes.

I think we can all agree we are well overdue a second.

Paul Cassidy believes we’re in for a tough game tonight. His latest Dark Days article will be available tomorrow.

http://ift.tt/2hyhaY2

#CelticNoise #Celtic #CelticFC #TheCelticBlog #News

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 7 years

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Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB’s First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson’s 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

“I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”

On Saturday, Oakland Athletics rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell, a black man, became the first MLB player to kneel during the national anthem. In a moment that faintly echoed Robinson and white teammate Pee Wee Reese’s iconic embrace seven decades ago, Mark Canha placed his left hand on Maxwell’s shoulder. The game went on. Oakland beat Texas 1-0.

Maxwell spoke eloquently about his reasons for taking a knee. Following his tweets from the weekend, you can see that Donald Trump’s fixation on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry rather than national issues like the destruction of Puerto Rico struck a chord with him.

Why did it take so long?

The conservatism that has always held baseball hostage is a short, serviceable answer. It’s nothing new. Back when Muhammad Ali was embracing the Nation of Islam, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos were raising their fists in black solidarity at the Olympics, the most meaningful activism among baseball players was economic—the fight to unionize and to earn free agency. Even the leaders of those movements faced backlash from their fellow players, not to mention owners, the media, and the public at large.

In the company of a few players last year, for example, I mentioned the (once again relevant) Paid Patriotism in Sports investigation led by Republican Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain from Arizona, which revealed that the Department of Defense paid MLB and other major sports leagues millions of dollars to stage many of the boutique military exercises we as players had all become so accustomed to being accessories to, standing at attention with our hands over our hearts along the foul line. One player told me that this was “liberal fake news,” and that “John McCain would never do no kinda shit like that.”

Orioles veteran centerfielder Adam Jones is one of the few players to consistently speak out about issues of race, from talking about Freddie Gray’s death in 2015 to calling out fans who shouted the N-word at him in Fenway Park last season. A year ago, Jones said that Kaepernick–style protests hadn’t made their way to MLB because “baseball is a white man’s sport.”

Jones was one of just 58 black, African American, or African Canadian players on active rosters for Opening Day this season, according to the 2017 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card. That number doesn’t include Maxwell, who was called up from Triple-A later in April, nor several players who were on the DL, but the report still calls attention to “the relatively small and declining percentage of African-American players” in baseball.

It should be noted that Afro-Caribbean players born in the U.S. are not always counted in that group. I am both African and American—my parents’ native Cuba was only a few stops on the Atlantic slave trade away from the Alabama of Maxwell’s youth—but on the only Jackie Robinson Day in which I was in the Major Leagues (2009), I was not tabbed for that photo opportunity.

The same 2017 report card notes that there are more players of color in the league now than ever before. And the growing Latino presence in MLB creates more racial complexity that is especially hard to follow for people who don’t see race and want all this race stuff to go back into the shadows. Many Latino people are racist. Many Latino people deny their own blackness. For every white-passing Latino with less than a quarter of African blood in them who speaks with an alarming NPM (niggas per minute) in public spaces, there is an undeniably African Latino who doesn’t believe they’re black. The individual desires of people of color to defer participation in “race” chips at the solidarity of the black community as efficiently as racism itself does. This is hard for anthropologists to follow, much less ballplayers.

Black solidarity is difficult to negotiate with a language barrier, and one should understand what might dissuade, for instance, a Venezuelan Afro-Latino from criticizing any aspect of American culture when matters are worse in every sense, including race issues, in their own country. Black people who are well traveled, especially Afro-Latinos who’ve traveled to many Spanish-speaking countries, eventually come to the glib conclusion quicker than anyone else, that despite our longtime and recently stoked problems here in America, there is perhaps no better place in the world to be black.

Kaepernick’s protest spread slowly but surely across the NFL, where African-Americans made up 69.7 percent of players last year. Athletes in the NBA and the WNBA—two more leagues with majority black rosters—have also become fluent in peaceful protest in the last few years. Demographics may have kept the Kaepernick movement from catching on in baseball, but it’s important to note that baseball conservatism has many layers.

In baseball, conformism is subconsciously enforced by the martial law of the purpose pitch, and by the ingrained biases of the people in power who make personnel decisions and drive its culture. When you wear your hat a certain way, a coach may say, “Why do you have to be different?” Your hair may irk him, and when you miss the cutoff man, it may be more irksome to him than when the guy who looks more like his son does it. There’s the crappy .220 hitter and there’s the scrappy .220 hitter, and the formula for who goes to AAA and who stays on as the good clubhouse guy is subjective at best.

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

Three weeks into the NFL season, Colin Kaepernick is still unemployed. NFL insiders have been more reticent to say he’s being blackballed than non-insiders like activist Shaun King. While Kaepernick is probably as capable as most starting NFL quarterbacks, he is not in the elite, irreplaceable strata of athletes. This gives the owners who don’t sign him (i.e., all the owners) plausible deniability. It complicates the issue of Kaepernick’s unemployment.

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

As a player, Bruce Maxwell is even more replaceable than Kaepernick. Though the Oakland A’s were swift to defend Maxwell after he kneeled on Saturday, it is important to note that if he were to be blackballed, it would be virtually impossible to prove. To date, Maxwell has proven he is a light-hitting catcher worth about half a win above replacement over the course of a season. Though many ballplayers are late bloomers, Maxwell’s 300 at-bats represent a sufficiently large enough sample size for him to slowly fade into journeyman status without a second thought.

But whether he noticed or not, Maxwell’s path was eased by other circumstances. The Oakland A’s were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs on September 22, though they were never in the race at all, and even sold off their best pitcher at the trade deadline. The length of MLB’s season holds that half its teams engage in dozens of meaningless games, such as Saturday’s historic, meaningless contest between the Rangers and the Athletics. Maxwell has enjoyed the luxury of relatively low stakes—in baseball terms.

Along those lines, a story:

The morning after my club, the Tampa Bay Rays, beat the Red Sox in the 2008 ALCS, a handful of teammates and I supported then Senator Barack Obama at a rally in Florida. As a rookie, I was “hazed” by being volunteered to introduce the most famous political figure of our generation with a short speech before a capacity crowd at Legends Field. We were criticized for associating the team with a political party, but it was manageable—World Series stakes or not, Tampa is a tiny sports market. At the same time, had there not been several senior teammates with me, I might not have gone to the Obama rally. I might have caved under the pressure of fitting in that Maxwell overcame. And despite a military veteran father of my own, had all of what’s happening now been happening in the middle of a playoff race I was in as a rookie, especially in a major market, I would probably not have taken a knee—by myself no less—during the national anthem, either. You don’t want to be labeled a “distraction” by the media, and then become one in a superstitious, cliquey clubhouse as a rookie who is a new actor in a championship run that is years in the making. We have yet to see a major baseball star in a major market make a major political engagement. We have yet to see a Kaepernick–grade athlete use the platform of a championship run, with its larger audience. The “distraction” is perhaps entirely superstition, which especially pervades sports, but its effect is real.

My money would have been on Jones to be the first player to take a knee, despite his comments. My number two choice would have been Rays pitcher Chris Archer. But Maxwell was the right guy at the right time. He was born on a military base in Germany. His father is a veteran. For a certain kind of person watching these protests—which many critics have mischaracterized as being about “the flag” or “the troops,” instead of racial inequality and police violence—he had the credibility, along with the courage, to do something.

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

“It did take a while in baseball, I think mainly because the other sports that do that are predominantly black,” says Archer. “Our sport isn’t, so I think the criticism might be a little more harsh. It took somebody really special that had a unique background to take that leap.

“The way he went about it was totally, I think, as respectful as possible, just letting everybody know that this doesn’t have anything to do with the military, first and foremost, noting that he has family members that are in the military. It’s a little bit tougher for baseball players to make that leap, but I think he was the right person to do it.”

What Happens Now

Maxwell was cheered by the home Oakland crowd in his first at-bat since kneeling, a line-out to left field. In Mariners veteran Felix Hernandez, he was not forced to face the kind of (white, surly) pitcher one might expect to throw at a guy to send a political message, though it’s not at all implausible a pitcher of Felix Hernandez’s background could have thrown that purpose pitch “for America” after reading a tea party blog during pregame.

In the last week of the season, more teams will be eliminated (including the Rays), and their players will officially have no distraction superstition as a deterrent. For these players, there will be fewer games after which to face reporters. Here is what Archer told me in a text message: “What [Maxwell] did was tasteful & respectful to all parties. I wouldn’t be surprised if more guys start to follow suit.”

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB’s First Knee syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

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flauntpage · 7 years

Text

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson's 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

"I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

Why did it take so long?

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

Along those lines, a story:

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

What Happens Now

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

0 notes