It’s no secret that I’m pulling for the Houston Astros in this year’s World Series. After all, I predicted them to go all the way long before the season got started, and when it comes to sports fans, fewer things are more gratifying than being right, so it’s exciting to me that the team I called in December actually has a legitimate shot to fulfill my prediction.
But I have to say that even if the Astros pull off the victory, it’s going to be somewhat of a tainted victory, marred by naturally, some off-the-field shenanigans that the media has snowballed into a gargantuan deal that goes viral on social media and overshadows the event in which it took place, regardless of just how good of an event the actual event is turning out to be.
Because that’s what social media does, it ruins everything.
So the Astros’ first baseman, Yuliesky Gourriel AKA Yuli Gurriel to the hordes of people who don’t actually give a shit about baseball but have heard about this unfortunate story and want to be outraged by it anyway, was caught on camera making a supposed racist gesture towards the Dodgers’ pitcher Yu Darvish, whom everyone seems to be identifying as solely Japanese despite the fact that he’s actually half Iranian.
The thing is, I saw when this happened live, because I actually like baseball and was actually watching the game when the event occurred: Gurriel hits a home run off of Darvish, and then is back in the dugout. Because FOX loves to pan cameras back to the person of the moment, they’re repeatedly panning back on Gurriel who is now back in the dugout, smiling and laughing with all of his present teammates, ecstatic at giving the Astros a lead on the Dodgers. The offensive moment is all of 0.5 seconds, before Gurriel is back to quaffing his doofy bouffant hair.
It’s super easy to miss, and to me watching it as an Asian person, didn’t even notice that it had occurred. It wasn’t until the next morning did I see Gurriel’s name on the sidebar of Facebook as a hot topic did I even learn that such a thing was perceived, and by then it had already snowballed into an avalanche that could shake Mt. Everest. And from the few outlets that I bothered to read from, I didn’t get an inkling of indication that any of these people actually saw it happen, but screencaps are forever, and when isolated into a single frame, it’s clear that Gurriel stopped the entire game and held the pose for 25 straight minutes, while the white knights of the planet collectively got triggered.
Does my indifference make the offensive gesture okay? Of course not, a racist gesture is never okay. But at the same time, taking jabs at Asians is something of a double-standard that unfortunately exists in professional sports that I’m just desensitized to. Blacks and Hispanics are off-limits, but Asians do not have that luxury, and this isn’t the first time that a professional athlete has done the “chinky eyes” gesture and gotten nothing more than a slap on the wrist for it.
MLB exacerbated the problem by not only acknowledging the incident, but by dropping the ball through the floor of their 50-story headquarters by mandating punishment to happen – next season. With the justification for the delay being “not wanting to punish the entire team for the actions of one.”
And I get that the Astros themselves are in the World Series, and it’s of the utmost importance to field the team with the greatest chance to win each game, but the team themselves could’ve sent a powerful and extremely PR-wise move to have benched Gurriel on their own for game 4; especially considering Gurriel’s struggles against left-handed pitching, and the Dodgers starting left-handed Alex Wood, it would have been a super-easy convenient move to have stated they were benching him for disciplinary reasons when they’re really actually doing it for strategy.
But they didn’t, and not only did the Astros lose game 4 anyway, they missed a golden opportunity to really stick it to MLB, gain massive PR goodwill, and really make it look like they care about equality.
By MLB logic, discrimination against Asians ranks below homophobia, since this very season, a member of the Toronto Blue Jays was suspended immediately for calling someone a ‘faggot’ but Yuli Gurriel gets off with a delayed punishment for making fun of Asians.
Man, did the Astros drop a huge ball on their own.
The funny thing is that knowing Gurriel’s history, not that I’m advocating making a racist gesture on national television, but I feel that he has some reason to harbor a little salt towards Asians; save for his homer off of Darvish, he’s basically been tormented by Asians throughout his baseball career. He was a member of the Cuban national baseball squad that lost to Japan in 2006 and 2009 in the World Baseball Classic, and lost to South Korea in the gold medal game of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Not that sour grapes are justifiable reasons, if there were ever a guy to hold salt towards Asians, it’s Gurriel.
I know it’s weird that I’m flipping between both sides of the argument, but ultimately the gesture itself doesn’t annoy me as much as the social justice outcry in the aftermath. It was such a fast gesture that I feel that someone looking to get pissed off about something had to have been looking for, and then it took off from there.
The bottom line is that this incident has already started to overshadow, what’s turning out to be one hell of a World Series on the competitive front. Although I root for the Astros, I’d have no problem seeing the Dodgers win, since I have no beef with them. But if the Astros do in fact win, it’ll be a title drug down by this moment, and if the Astros win, this incident will be forever identified as the de facto reason why the Astros succumbed to the distraction of it, and lost.
Regardless, it sucks any way it’s looked at.
