Bewildered and irate phone calls to the Star’s newsroom began pouring in about 6 a.m. last Saturday. It would be a long day for the switchboard crew.
A flood of sharply negative e-mails also was reported. Scores of readers said they’d cancelled the paper. On Tuesday, the letters page was full of fury.
By Wednesday when the storm abated, my guess is that close to 2,000 readers had taken time out of the long July 1 weekend to dump on the Star.
The metaphors they chose were a jumble of imagery not all printable but the underlying sentiment was nearly unanimous.
The Star had inexplicably stirred the racial pot, stumbled into controversy, shot itself in the foot, and taken a cheap shot at a local icon, the Toronto Blue Jays.
Worst of all, those things happened when the team was showing signs of life after nearly a decade in the dumpster of major league baseball, just as Torontonians were getting up off the mat after two ruinous outbreaks of SARS in the city.
Adjectives flew.
Readers said they were appalled, disappointed, outraged, disgusted and shocked by the ridiculous, offensive, stupid and ill-conceived front-page headline and 25 mugshots of Blue Jays, most with white complexions.
To put it mildly, the headline was provocative:
“The White Jays? In a city of so many multicultural faces, Toronto’s baseball team is the whitest in the league. Why?”
Understandably, many readers took the headline to mean the paper had uncovered evidence of racism in the Blue Jays front office, a deliberate campaign to recruit white players for a team that plays ball in a racially diverse city.
I for one drew that inference.
The caption below the players’ pictures may have reinforced that impression in some minds.
Ever since general manager J.P. Ricciardi began rebuilding the team in November, 2001, the caption said, the Blue Jays have become “the least diverse team” in baseball.
Yet, the actual story as opposed to the front-page pump-primer made no allegations of racism. And reporter Geoff Baker’s statistics on the Jays’ new face have not been challenged.
Actually, his story was about economics, not racism. A money-losing team saves money by recruiting players from college ranks instead of scouting them as teenagers and spending buckets of money to develop their less-proven talents.
As Baker quoted Ricciardi, “There are (few) black players playing college baseball, that’s a fact. You’re drawing from a very, very small pool.” So, too, with Latin Americans.
The story also noted “a decade-long trend that has seen blacks shift away from baseball in favour of other sports.”
Many readers wondered why the Star appeared to single out the Jays for racial analysis. Why not the White Maple Leafs or the Black Raptors?
But as I read Baker’s story, he was writing about a changed racial mix in the Jays, a newsworthy development that warranted exposition and explanation. By contrast, the racial makeups of our local hockey and basketball teams haven’t changed. So no news there.
Still, many Star readers said, bluntly, they don’t care what colour their favourite ballplayers are. Even green would be all right. So why is the Star preoccupied with race?
Actually, race in sport is a subject that may be a mine field for editors, but is often interesting and worthy of attention.
In February, the Boston Globe ran a 1,300-word article by Gordon Edes that explored an embarrassing fact of life in the Boston Red Sox organization.
With black players in short supply, the Red Sox found themselves at spring training without one African-American projected to be an everyday position player or a member of the starting rotation.
The embarrassing part, of course, was the fact that Boston became the last team in major league baseball to integrate when Pumpsie Green made his debut in 1959, the newspaper reported.
Six years ago, Sports Illustrated tackled race in a provocative, 6,500-word article headlined:
“What Ever Happened To The White Athlete? Unsure of his place in a sports world dominated by blacks who are hungrier, harder-working and perhaps physiologically superior, the young white male is dropping out of the athletic mainstream to pursue success elsewhere.”
But 2,000 disappointed, upset Star customers weren’t in need of a remedial reading course when they jumped to conclusions after seeing the over-the-top, torqued introduction on Page 1 to Baker’s stories.
Managing editor Mary Deanne Shears readily agreed the front-page headline was a mistake.
“The fact that we tied multiculturalism to the new-look Jays led people to conclude that this was about racism,” she said. “That’s not what the story said. It was about the way economics has changed the face of the team.
“We deeply regret the impression that was created, and apologize to readers who were offended.”
In my view, the episode is a cautionary tale for editors at this paper who want to engage readers in healthy and necessary discussions about race.
It would be a pity if the Page 1 stumble over the Blue Jays undermined the confidence so many readers expressed in the Star’s courageous series on race and crime last year, or deterred the paper from sticking its nose into other delicate subjects seldom visited by media rivals.
Make no mistake. This was an embarrassment for the Star.
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Racial References: Tanya Gulliver, a former Star community editorial board member, recently took umbrage at a photo caption she spotted in the paper. Rightly so, too.
The caption identified a youthful contestant in the Ontario Spelling Bee as “a First Nations competitor.” As Gulliver pointed out, the Star didn’t label another participant in the spelling bee as a “red-headed white competitor.”
Race had no relevance to the spelling-bee story. It shouldn’t have been mentioned. Thanks go to Gulliver for a timely reminder.
