Junto Boys

Diversity is officially a religion. The struggling Florida Marlins fired their manager over the weekend and brought in Trader Jack McKeon to finish out the season. Bud Selig wants to know whether the Marlins followed the minority-hiring guidelines. The guidelines are more or less a series of hoop jumps to show that you considered minorities for the job. The league office is supposed to look at your interview list before you hire anyone.

It’s all public relations, because most managers are chosen without an interview. The population of potential managers is very small and these guys already know each other. It just means that General Managers spend more time interviewing managers than scouting players, and a lot of minority coaches are flying around the country interviewing for jobs that are already spoken for.

I’m sure the system can theoretically lead to more minority hiring, but you can’t handcuff teams in the middle of a season over this. It’s hard to make a transition midseason, because you can’t tell the outgoing manager that he is leaving until the new manager is ready to take over. If the team has to send faxes to the league office, word is going to get out that the old manager is being fired. You don’t want these guys learning about this on ESPN.

In this particular situation, the Marlins were having a run of bad luck. Their pitching staff is hurt and they needed the steady hand of an old pro. They chose 72 year old Jack McKeon. They weren’t going to find that kind of sage experience in an interview.

We’re taught that race is the most superficial quality a person has. Everyone is an individual and should be judged on their merit. But when we don’t see enough people of a certain color represented somewhere, we sacrifice our color-blind rhetoric to “correct” the problem. How can we be a nation of equals when we insist on defining each other by our color?