They Aren’t All Alike Just Because They’re From Asia
Seriously, announcers and analysts need to stop this whole comparing Japanese players to other Japanese players. Let me set the scene for you. It is a lovely Monday night and the Cubs are playing the Mets. Yigael is watching the game on ESPN and I am watching the game on MLB Extra Innings (SNY, the Mets station).
Yigael IMs me (sorry for the second straight post featuring instant conversations over the intertubes) and says that Orel Hershisher just said Kosuke Fukudome is a cross between Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki. Not a half hour later on the SNY broadcast, Keith Hernandez goes into a diatribe about how all Japanese players are “well-schooled” in the ways of baseball.
It’s not that I’m all PC, though these stereotypes are very grating, it’s that it’s just downright lazy to fall into these traps when you describe Asian players — ‘they’re just like other Asian player X and they’re so fundamentally sound.’ Just stop, please.
Hideki Matsui is a little bit like Fukudome swing-wise, but if you want a good player to compare him to, how about Bobby Abreu, who is also a right fielder that hits for average, steals a little, gets on base with the best of them, is a solid defender and has moderate power? See! It’s not that hard.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
As other people have noted, this whole racial profiling phenomenon applies to pretty much every race: white people are compared to other white people, blacks to blacks, latinos to latinos. This example is especially egregious because there are so few asians in baseball, so that a) it’s totally unlikely that they are actually comparable, and b) it’s just really lazy because Ichiro and H. Matsui are the only other good Japanese hitters (apologies to Kaz Matsui and So Taguchi).
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:21 am
Yea, I mean the stereotyping is ridiculous, but I think the laziness actually bothers me more. Dey urm look kinda dur same.
Thank god for similarity scores.