Tejada: Thank you The baseball
Now after watching the All-Star game last night on Fox, two things became clear.
1: The Fox fall line up is going to suck. I don’t remember specifics, but they had trailers for a couple of new shows.
OK, one specific, Michael Rappaport plays a white dad whose (white) daughter is dating a black kid (who, I would imagine, through a series of ethnic stereotypes, both offends and charms the crackers). The one scene they played in the commercial has M Rap asking the young thug "whats your name" and the thug responding with "Tay, it’s short for Boo-tay."
Tremendous. Just when I thought doing cases of whippits by myself every night was why my brain cell count had been dropping so rapidly, Fox cleared it up with a proverbial tap on the shoulder and a whispered "excuse me sir, our programming has been designed to make you stupider."
Phil Mushnik (of the NY Post, or as I like to call it "The Newest Testament") does a pretty good job of taking the people who write this shit to task. I guess that if you live in Kansas or wherever the fuck it is that people have never had an interaction with anyone that wasn’t a middle-aged-white-christian-man, you could be mildly amused by the premise of the show. I would at least like to cash in on this "white person interacts with black person or some permutation of this scenario with slightly variable ethnicity’s" phenomenon of shitty TV shows and movies before it’s too late.
And if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, the Idea of M Rap as a father with a daughter who has already reached sexual maturity makes me feel old.
2: Miguel Tejada is a damn fine baseball player. They mentioned a couple of interesting tid-bits about him though. First that he "started working in the Dominican Republic at age 11." Which is pretty crazy, but you’ve gotta admire it.
Then they said that from the age of "14, the A’s were scouting him [Tejada] but he was so frail that they had to feed him until he was 16 and then they signed him."
They also went on to say that he didn’t own a baseball glove until he was 19, which I find a little difficult to believe, being that he was signed for 3 years at that point and is a damn fine shortstop who showed that off for a national audience last night.
But I do have a problem with his complete lack of comprehension of the English Language. I understand that when Americans go play baseball over in Japan, they don’t usually bother to learn the language, which is equally annoying, and if I was Japanese, it would piss me off.
Miguel Tejada is 29 years old, and has had some dealings with an American "company" (that would be the Oakland A’s) since he was 14 years old. So that means for MORE THAN HALF of his life, he has been training to play baseball in America. His training has obviously paid off.
I was wondering, when he was asked a question about the home run he hit and instead answered about the car he had won, why doesn’t this man have a firm grasp on the English language. I’m not saying that this is his fault either. Somewhere along the line someone should have seen that the kid was going to be in the national spotlight and would need to give interviews. Jesus Christ, learning to speak English would play dividends just on the strength of endorsement deals. Most of his teammates speak English, as do his managers, his opponents, the press, etc. etc. etc. Would it have really killed anyone if as they were grooming him to be an all-star, someone decided to take the time to help him with his English so he didn’t look like a moron on national television??
