Big league bigotry comes full circle.

• Author: Barrett, Wayne M.

The politically correct police -- in this case, black professional athletes and their enablers, the liberal sporting press -- are at it again. They blatantly are playing the race card in the wake of the season-long celebration marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier.

The height of absurdity on this issue was reached this spring when a column in The Sporting News decried, among other things, that the Dodgers, the team for which Robinson played during his 1947-56 Hall of Fame career, currently only have one native-born black American on their roster. The columnist asked: Wouldn't Jackie be ashamed, and sickened, if he were alive today to see how his old team was behaving?

Besides the fact that the Dodgers have had so many black stars over the years that it would be impossible to even begin listing them all, the Los Angeles roster is chock-full of minorities, including many Latin American blacks. The Dodgers' mound staff isn't known as "The International House of Pitchers" for nothing.

Perhaps most infuriating is the obsession with numbers. For instance, it has been cited that, in 1959, American-born blacks represented 17.25% of all major league ballplayers. Today, it's 15.4%. If you're going to play that game, blacks only comprise 10% of the general U.S. population, so they're overrepresented by more than five percent in the big leagues. Seriously, though, the game is open to everyone and critics would be hard-pressed to point to any of the 28 major league rosters and not be able to find plenty of minorities.

Actually, the case of general managers is where the black proponents show their true stripes. No sooner had the New York Yankees won the 1996 World Series than Bob Watson was addressing a post-game press conference saying how proud he was to be the first black GM in history to guide a championship team. Imagine if a white man claimed to be the white embodiment of baseball genius? Couldn't Watson have celebrated the pinnacle of his wonderful career as both a prominent player and ground-breaking general manager on an individual basis, simply expressing happiness and gratitude at finally being part of a World Series champion, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of all baseball personnel? Instead, he had to hold himself up as a symbol of a race, hoping to spur the hiring of other blacks based on his success.

The liberal press agreed, bemoaning the fact that there hasn't been a subsequent rush to...