Yunel Escobar did something incredibly stupid on Saturday afternoon, of that there is no doubt.
The Blue Jays’ shortstop took the field against the Boston Red Sox with the words “Tu ere maricon” printed on his eye black — the stickers underneath his eyes that allegedly cut down on glare from the sun — and played a major-league baseball game with a message written right there on his face that translates to English as “You are a (derogatory term referring to homosexuals that rhymes with “slag”)”.
An alert Blue Jays fan spotted the slur, which went completely unnoticed during Saturday’s game, and blew the whistle on him on Monday, which resulted in Escobar being handed a three-game suspension by the club — with the support of Major League Baseball. Escobar seemed confused and upset at the Tuesday afternoon news conference at which he apologized for the incident. He said that it was a joke, it didn’t really mean anything, that he has nothing against the gay community and that, in fact, he even has some homosexual friends.
First off, I have to give credit to Escobar for not going before the media and saying that he made a mistake. Too often, in these situations, we hear about mistakes when there were none. Errors in judgement? Sure. But to do the wrong thing knowing that it is wrong with intent to do it is not to make a mistake — it’s to screw up, at the very least, and it’s often worse than that, but it’s not a mistake.
Escobar didn’t make a mistake, he did something incredibly stupid. But I don’t for a second think it was motivated by homophobia or by hate.
Now, given the message printed right on his face, it doesn’t really matter whether it was motivated by homophobia or hate, because it’s not as though Escobar didn’t know what that word meant.
I don’t know if it’s important to note that the word “maricon” is thrown around big-league clubhouses with the same relative ease with which other common curse words are, but it is. And even if that word is used so much that it has lost its true meaning, as Escobar tried to claim in the media conference, any Spanish speaker who uses it knows exactly what he or she is saying.
So even though I believe these were less the actions of a homophobe making an attempt to spread his brand of virulent, disgusting hate around the sporting landscape and more the actions of an immature young man whose sense of humour hasn’t evolved beyond a grade-school level, this was an enormous screw-up.
Escobar seemed confused when he apologized to the media (and using the “some of my friends are gay” line really doesn’t help, honest), and I think it was because he was completely taken aback by the reaction. He didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about since, in his mind, he was just making an innocent joke. But he has to be smarter than that. Alex Anthopoulos said that this was, in part, about a lack of education on Escobar’s part, but the truth is that no one should have to tell a 29-year-old man that writing “maricon” on his face in front of a viewing audience in the potential millions is something you shouldn’t do.
I’m not a fan of the righteous indignation that has come out since the incident, of the people saying they’ll never watch another Blue Jays game so long as Escobar is on the team, because, again, I believe what Escobar did was motivated by immaturity and, yes, stupidity – but not hate.
But here’s the thing — while we live in a society in which there is a large population of people who can’t wait to be offended, some of whom go out of their way to look for reasons to be offended, and in which political correctness has run so far amok that government workers get in trouble for using terms like “mother” as opposed to “parent” because they’re not inclusive enough — the Escobar incident has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Those who were offended by was Escobar wrote on his eye-black — homosexual or not — have every right to be offended, and he has to know better.
I get upset with callers to The BlueJaysTalk who use the term “gassed” to refer to someone getting fired, because among the references for the term are Holocaust victims being sent to gas chambers as part of the horrific mass murder perpetrated upon six million Jews and millions of others during the Second World War. I get upset about that knowing full well that the vast majority — if not all — of the callers who use that term haven’t the slightest idea that that’s where “gassed” comes from.
Escobar can’t say that he didn’t know what “maricon” meant, and he had to know that in an inclusive, forward-thinking, rational society, people were going to be offended by him writing that on his face. His actions make it obvious that we’re not dealing with a Rhodes scholar here, and that he needs to ramp up his maturity level and his basic awareness of what’s going on in the world around him if he’s going to get past this and be forgiven.
And that’s the question now, I guess — will he be forgiven? Can he be forgiven? It seems as though the most vocal of the fan base feels that the three-game suspension isn’t nearly harsh enough a punishment for his actions, and one wonders what the reaction will be when the Blue Jays come home from their 10-game road trip to wrap up the season.
Escobar already had a few things working against him as far as most fans were concerned. He’s having a terrible year at the plate, he came to Toronto with the reputation of being a problem in the clubhouse, and lately his on-field antics — such as making sure he catches every pop fly in his zip code — seem to be rubbing his teammates the wrong way. There are things you can get away with when you’re hitting .300 that you can’t get away with when you’re hitting .250. Not that Escobar would have been able to slough off this current controversy if he were having a good year, but since he’s not, it may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Thank you all so much for doing such a great job of voting for Tom Cheek in the first round of fan balloting for the Ford C. Frick Award for Broadcasting Excellence. Tom has advanced to the second round, which cuts the remaining group of 41 down to just three. We have to keep voting – once a day, every day, until voting closes at 5:00 PM Eastern on October 5th – to make sure those who elect the Frick winner are well aware of just how much Tom deserves to be honoured in Cooperstown among other broadcasting legends, how much he continues to mean to Blue Jays fans all across the world, and how important his contributions were to baseball fandom across this country.
So please, be even more diligent than you were before and make sure to go to www.facebook.com/baseballhall, then click on ’13 Frick Voting and cast your vote for Tom. He’s on the first page now, so it’s even easier! You can vote once every 24 hours, so please do so as often as you can. For more reminders, follow @VoteTomCheek on Twitter and like the “Send Tom Cheek To Cooperstown” page on Facebook. Thank you, you’re doing a wonderful thing for a wonderful man.