King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Gary Sheffield is the latest to get shouted down for racial comments. Thing is, he seems to have had a point.

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June 8, 2007 | So now that we've ridiculed and vilified and slapped down Gary Sheffield for his supposedly racially insensitive comments in GQ magazine, is it safe yet to wonder if he had a point?

GQ asked the Detroit Tigers outfielder about the dwindling number of African-Americans in the major leagues, and he said the reason Latins have replaced American blacks as baseball's chief minority is because they're easier to control.

"Where I'm from, you can't control us," Sheffield said. "You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man.

"These are the things my race demands. So, if you're equally good as this Latin player, guess who's going to get sent home? I know a lot of players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys."

The machinery kicked in, as it always does when any public figure says anything about race that wouldn't be heard at a meeting of the Can't We All Get Along and Pretend We've Conquered Racism Society.

He's insulting African-Americans! He owes an apology to every black person in America for saying that blacks aren't coachable or won't take instruction! He's insulting Latinos! He owes an apology to every Latin American in the Western Hemisphere for saying they're docile!

Sheffield gets something of a pass because he's black, and blacks can go further than whites with off-the-reservation racial commentary, but also because he's Gary Sheffield, who has been blowing hot air publicly since the early '90s.

It's never a bad bet that Sheffield's more or less full of it, but when he clarified his comments a few days later, it became apparent that he actually was trying to say something worth hearing, though he wasn't saying it very well.

"They have more to lose than we do," he said after expressing surprise that his original comments had caused a stir. "You can send them back across the island. You can't send us back. We're already here. So there are a lot of factors involved you look at. I'm not saying you can tell them what to do and it'll be 'yes sir' and 'no sir.' I'm just saying from a grand scheme of things."

Hmm. So whatever it is Sheffield is struggling to say, it's not fitting into a one-sentence sound bite, or if it is, Sheff's not the guy to make it fit. And it's pretty clear he's missing the biggest reason why Latins -- and, in a process that's really just starting, Asians -- are replacing American blacks in the majors, which is economic.

Next page: Carlos Guillen, actual Latino baseball player: "I'm happy he said it"