“Oriental players that could hit or pitch”
DMZ · March 31, 2005 at 1:57 pm · Filed Under General baseball
The Hall of Fame library has giant clipping files of newspaper and magazine artiles, organized by subject. I’ve been reading them all week (my eyes! ooooh my eyes) and came across this today, part of a tiny newspaper clipping with a handwritten date (“6/17/76”), which I’ll copy here, exactly as it appears, [sic] implied:
Pete Gebriam, Met farm director, received phone call. “Some guy from Staten Island wanted to know why we don’t have any Oriental players,” Gebriam said. “I asked him if he knew any who could hit or pitch. He didn’t.”
Six days after the scrawled date on this clipping, Sadaharu Oh hit his 700th home run while playing for the Yomiuri Giants.
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58 Responses to ““Oriental players that could hit or pitch””
Just to add some more confusion to the mix, here in the UK the term Oriental is used frequently to refer to things of origin in the Far East (i.e. China, Japan, Korea etc), but it’s probably considered mildly offensive as a noun for an inhabitant of that area (what I believe that many USians would call Asians).
However… the ethnic term Asian is used here predominately to denote those whose origins are from Asian parts of the former British Empire / Commonwealth, i.e. people who can trace their origins to the Indiam Subcontinent i.e. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
GWO: As long as you don’t call us Pakis (spelling?). 🙂
I once had a truly bizarre cup of coffee with a black guy (African-Britain?) in a pub in London. Hearing I was an Indian-American living in the US, he told me that India was his favorite place ever visited b/c of its great culture and that the US was his least favorite (b/c all the white people treated him, he said, like a criminal). So far, so logical. Then he starts grousing about how Indian culture is great in India, but how it’s disrepectful to the English how Indians “insist” on speaking their native language in England, and why can’t they all just learn English better? Cognitive dissonance setting in fast…
30 – Yes. If you deny the existence of implication, you never have to worry about offending people unless you explicitly insult them.
35 – The OED defines hispanic as “pertaining to Spain and its people”. That’s a pretty narrow definition, but I’m working from an unabridged first edition, which means it was written no later than 1928. I believe later editions define hispanic as anyone from a Spanish-speaking country. That would mean that Spaniards and Dominicans are hispanic, but Brazilians and Arubans are not. Note that it does not matter what language the person actually speaks – just what language is spoken in their homeland. The 7% of Peruvians who are of Japanese descent (like recent Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori) would count as Hispanics.
Webster, which I consider to be a vastly inferior dictionary, disagrees.
46 – And one of the reasons Africa was colonised was because it had a bunch of unused farmland. That’s only an economic motivation. And even considering the slave trade, the slaves were taken not because they were balck, but because they were valuable. They were valuable because they were black, but why they were valuable didn’t matter to the colonists.
45 – I don’t think Russia did colonise the Baltic states. The economic relationship doesn’t fit. You could argue that the Mongols colonised Russia, though. Same with the Vikings.
Maybe I’m missing something here. Should I be offended if someone in Europe calls me a “Yank?”
#54: I can’t imagine why, depending on what the word immediately in front of it was. “Bloody” isn’t good; the F-bomb means it might be time to politely run away. But normally it’s just what you are, a Yank.
Now, if you really want to get in hot water, try calling a Scot or a Welshman “English”. “Brit” is good but make damn sure you’re not confusing it with the E-word, as in “I’ve met a lot of interesting Scottish and British folks here”.
And any American in Britain can expect to be lectured at least once on the subject of supporting the IRA bombers. Surprisingly, you are very unlikely to receive any heat about GW Bush, even though his popularity rating there hovers around 1%, because they’re well aware that if the conversation turns to Tony Bliar their advantage disappears. But they can be awfully touchy about their pig-headed inbred mental-defective Royals, sometimes.
Everyone is a victim.
#52 Just as an indicator of the idiocy and mentality of some of Britain’s racists, (and there are, it seems, an increasing number of them) : Near my brother’s old flat^H^H^H^H apartment in Birmingham, there was a graffito that read “Pakis go back to India”…
Some people can, but most of us find our pig-headed inbred mental-defective Royals as amusing as everybody else does. And whatever we think of Blair, we still prefer him to Bush.