Northwestern University Newsfeed

June 30, 2006

SAVAGE: What they are doing mostly is sort of a relatively shallow kind of covering their rear with potential customers rather than actually addressing the issues of homophobia in baseball. Statistically speaking, there are gay major league baseball players, but none of them are out because, of course, coming out would end their careers.

Savage says the situation is exacerbated by the subject of Guillen’s remarks…

SAVAGE: Jay Mariotti is a prime example of what is wrong with sports media….a lot of shouting and screaming…a lot of small things blown up into big things…a lot of hysteria…and that’s part of the general shift in sports media culture over the past 20 years. The whole creation of talk radio…the 24-hour news cycle…the multiple sports cable channels…they have to have something to talk about or they have dead air.

Savage says part of the backlash from Guillen’s remarks has been due to his position as White Sox manager….

SAVAGE: A GM says one thing…it’s worse than if a manager says…and its worse than if a player says it because we don’t expect a lot from baseball players in terms of sensitively to the world. We expect strikeouts and homeruns. But the higher up a player is in a team’s hierarchy, the more what he or she says represents the team.

Savage says the idea that a baseball player has to be an “upstanding citizen” is a relatively new concept…

SAVAGE: It’s one based on baseball trying to sell itself as the clean game and the All-American sport at a time when the media no longer respects the boundaries that used to be in place between players’ personal lives and what they did on the field. Babe Ruth was a notorious visitor of prostitutes, but they didn’t write about that…they wrote about his homeruns.