BASEBALL Latino, Caribbean players bristle over Sosa's saga

However, criticism goes hand-in-hand with success.
By MARCOS BRETON
SACRAMENTO BEE
Ten years ago, baseball superstar Juan Gonzalez said that he felt like an outsider in the game he dominated.
"Baseball is not our game. It's theirs -- the Americans' game," the Puerto Rican-born slugger said a few years before he won two Most Valuable Player awards.
Years before that, fellow Puerto Rican and Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda said Caribbean mothers once wept when their sons journeyed to play ball in the United States.
That's because in the 1950s and '60s, danger lurked everywhere: segregation, discrimination, xenophobia and the worst nightmare of any ballplayer -- a hostile manager.
Treatment
The greatest Mexican player who ever lived -- a man called the Mexican Babe Ruth -- actually rejected playing in the U.S. after one minor-league season in 1964.
Hector Espino said he didn't need the racism or the second-class status he encountered in Jacksonville, Fla., so he went back to Mexico and hit a combined 791 career home runs in the Mexican summer and winter leagues.
Then there was a late summer day at Dodger Stadium in 1997, when current American League MVP Miguel Tejada stood before a pack of reporters for the first time and discovered that his big-league career had been christened with taunting swipes in the newspapers.
Tejada said he hoped to be the A's shortstop for 10 years. But in the mangled remedial English he spoke then, his words came out as a declarative boast: " 'I'm going to be the A's shortstop for 10 years,' said Tejada, who went 0-for-5 in his major league debut," cracked USA Today.
Then-teammate Rafael Bournigal read that and snapped, scolding Tejada as if he were a 3-year-old and schooling him in a baseball culture that demands rookies play hard and shut up.
The look on Tejada's face at that moment was heartbreaking enough, but you should have seen him when the scribes descended on him later and Tejada had no idea what they were asking him.
Get the picture?
Lay low
Understand why Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox and Vladimir Guerrero of the Montreal Expos -- two of the most prolific hitters of the last decade -- are hermits in their own clubhouses?
It's the same reason Sammy Sosa and supporters from Latin America are seething over Sosa's public tumble from grace for using an illegal bat in a game last week.
To them, the bull's-eye on Sosa's back symbolizes what happens to Latino players in the U.S -- players who are either ignored or disproportionately criticized for their faults.
Pedro Martinez, the stellar pitcher for the Red Sox, loudly gave voice to this sentiment last week when he went ballistic over ESPN's wall-to-wall Sosa coverage.
Martmnez charged that if retired slugger Mark McGwire had been caught with a corked bat, "It would still be a big deal, but not like this. ... We may be Latin, a minority, but we're not dumb."
True. Martinez is no dummy. But while his protective rage is understandable, his anger is ultimately misplaced and fails to recognize an undeniable truth:
The world of baseball and the world around us has changed.
Just as the owner of the Anaheim Angels is now named Arturo Moreno, the fact is that four of the five highest-paid players in baseball are named (Alex) Rodriguez, (Carlos) Delgado, the aforementioned Ramirez and Sosa, according to the Associated Press.
Latino players dominate postseason awards and the All-Star Game, and a new and bigger crop of youngsters with Spanish surnames is surging up from the minor leagues.
Meanwhile, Sosa -- the Dominican with dark skin -- is the most popular and marketable player in baseball and one of the biggest in sports.
That seemed impossible a decade ago, but now it is. Though Sosa is learning that when you're the man, you eventually taste the underside of mass acceptance.
Instead of getting angry, Sosa should ask his friend Michael Jordan what that's like. Meanwhile, the rest of us shouldn't look upon Sosa's struggles with anger or sadness, but with recognition and celebration of hard-earned progress.