I'm glad Paul Lo Duca never declared his candidacy for anything other than National League All-Star Catcher. I'd hate to see his quotes taken out of context, particularly this quote fragment from Friday:
“I'm a gambler, a racist and I like 18-year-old girls.”
Can't you just hear the rest? I'm Russell Martin and I approved this message — because handling a pitching staff is too important to be left to deviants.
Of course Lo Duca wasn't making his case for the Ty Cobb Sharpened Spike Award, given each year to the player who best exemplifies the worst in humanity. The rest of what he said was:
“That's the perception in New York. Is any of it true? Not an ounce of it, and nobody knows that.”
I'll leave the gambling and 18-year-old girls out of it since that's last year's tawdry news. The other thing? In this hemisphere's most multinational dugout? I don't think that's Lo Duca. I don't know the man and I don't know what goes on behind closed clubhouse doors, but the contretemps that his defensive quote was based on didn't strike me as racist whatsoever.
It struck me as a good journalism lesson.
This is the peep from Paulie that got his latest ball of confusion rolling, as recorded first by Peter Botte and rereported (in the wake of the paper's sudden interest in the Mets) by Adam Rubin of the Daily News:
I'll do this [interview], but you need to start talking to other players. It's the same three or four people every day. Nobody else wants to talk. Some of these guys have to start talking. They speak English, believe me.
It was assumed or inferred that “some of these guys” didn't refer to Aaron Sele or Damion Easley or whichever non-Latino Met whose brain isn't picked to death before and after games. So let's go along with that premise, that Lo Duca meant you should go get quotes from somebody who isn't him or Wright or Glavine or Wagner or Green.
He's right. How can you not notice, if you're an aficionado of game stories and audio actualities, that it is essentially the same five guys who are gone to on a team that at any given moment is at least half Latino? That it's almost never one of the fellows from Puerto Rico or the Dominican or Venezuela?
Is it because Carlos Delgado is hiding in the trainers' room? Because Carlos Beltran seems about as dull off the field as he is usually exciting on it? Or is it because the Mets' beat writers are white guys who, without malice, tend to gravitate to guys with whom they can communicate most easily with the fewest obvious barriers?
Probably a little of each. The players who are dying to talk to the media are legendarily the vast minority in any accent. If you give them an out, they'll take it. The language differences certainly don't contribute to the desire to chat. It's hard enough to say something interesting in English. Imagine trying to be engaging in your second language.
Nevertheless, they're all paid enough to talk. Delgado shouldn't hide if indeed that's what he's doing (as has been implied). As for the other guys who aren't from the U.S., I haven't had a hard time understanding them when a microphone's been thrust to their lips. Beltran is gracious. Reyes explains the game very well, certainly as well as the omnipresent Wright. Gomez, 21, talked his way through the bunt that knocked out Clemens a few weeks ago (making me think Omar Minaya's policy that Met minor leaguers, wherever they're from, speak English and Spanish is one of the best ideas a GM's ever implemented). Franco has obviously seen it all. And if Delgado isn't steamed at his own performance, he's totally the man when it comes to speaking baseball. Perez, Feliciano, Valentin…I've heard them talk if not as often as their Anglo teammates. Their words are as good as anybody else's. Seek them out like you would Paulie's or David's.
I won't pretend to know the dynamic of the Met clubhouse, but everything we've been able to divine says, the occasional entertaining Lo Duca blowup notwithstanding, that everybody gets along reasonably famously. Whether it matters or not, that's reassuring. And as long as we expect to hear from ballplayers before and after games, we may as well hear from as many of them as possible. I don't think Lo Duca's a racist. But I also don't think those whose job it is to interview Mets have been mining every corner of the roster in pursuit of perspective. If there's a scandal in any of this, that's what it is.