At least I'm not as stupid as those people

I am not the brightest individual on the face of the earth, but I am quite certain that I'm pretty far off from the dumbest, which is why I become frustrated when dumb things happen on a large scale that could have easily been prevented. When dumb things happen that could have been prevented it tells me that there are stupid people running things and well, I don't much well like me stupid people. I'm not talking test score stupid, I'm talking general common sense and decency stupid. It makes me wonder how people get to certain places being so dumb.

So what the hell am I talking about? I'm talking about baseball's first ever "Civil Rights Game". OK, couple things to get out before we go farther. I like the idea of baseball game celebrating civil rights. In fact I pretty much for anything that helps to promote the issue of civil right and that causes people to examine the good and bad in regards to civil rights in this country. Anyway, this game was being held in Memphis, Tennessee, in part as remembrance for Martin Luther King Jr. since it was the city in which he was assassinated. OK, so far so good, everything seems fine.

Well I happened to stumble upon this game just as it was starting and well after the premise was presented to me I was a little surprised by one of the teams involved. The game was a match up between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cleveland Indians. Read that last sentence and see if you can figure out the problem with the match up. If you haven't figured it out, or if you didn't feel like reading it again, the problem with that match up would just so happen to be that the second team involved was the Cleveland Indians.

I have nothing against the Indians ball club really, Travis Hafner is one of my favorite players to watch and I enjoy C.C. Sabbathia as well. The issue here is with Major League Baseball choosing the a team named Indians to participate in a game honoring civil rights.

In case you're not aware or have been living in total seclusion for your entire life (which is doubtful if you're reading this because it's pretty hard to stumble out of the woods and right on to the Internet), Indians in this country have kind of been dumped on. By kind of been dumped on I mean they've pretty much been disregarded, disrespected, lied to, exploited, treated with indifference, vitriol and generally a complete lack of humanity ever since folks from Europe stared coming to this continent in mass.

Life is still far from peachy for most American Indians. Go to Google and type in "indian reservations + suicide rates" or "alcoholism" or "poverty" and well you'll be confronted with some reading material that will most certainly not lift your spirits.

So for the life of me I couldn't figure out why the hell MLB would have one of the teams in this game be the Indians. Before I get into why though, let me deviate for just a moment. I'm not trying to be the PC police on the this. I'm just about as annoyed with political correctness as one can be. I'm not saying be PC is bad and that you shouldn't consider the feelings of people when speaking, it's just that I feel sometimes it goes overboard and things get blown out of proportion. Do I find sports teams being named after Indians particularly upsetting or problematic? Not entirely. It's generally the depiction of of the Indians that I take issue with. The easiest example of this is the Cleveland Indians Mascot, Chief Wahoo whose picture is featured below.

It's hard to see how that picture couldn't be viewed as offensive, especially to American Indians. A giant cartoonish, stereotypical depiction of an Indian is quite literally the face of the franchise. Well that face was invited to Memphis to play a baseball game in honoring civil rights.

Now in case you're not aware, Memphis was on of the major cities along the "Trail of Tears," the name given to the route traveled by thousands of Cherokee Indians after they were forcibly and perhaps more importantly, illegally removed from their native lands, which included areas in present day Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama. Nearly 4,000 Cherokee people (or about a quarter of the population was forced to move) died while being shipped to reservations in Arkansas and Oklahoma. This was and is not a bright spot in American Civil right in any way shape or form.

So what better way to celebrate civil rights using a baseball game than to invite the team that proudly and prominently displays a red-faced, feather wearing, stereotypical caricature of a people that have been persecuted pretty much from their first contact with people not from this continent.

I traveled to the computer after I saw who was involved in the game and stumbled across this post on Deadspin, that was thinking what I was thinking, which led me to this article, that pretty much articulates what I'm saying, just much more coherently and with actual reporting.

Simply put, I just don't get it. Major League baseball has screwed up plenty (turning a blind eye to steroids for a long time being the most obvious issue). But steroids are a prickly issue and a complex problem. This game however was something easy and well the good folks at MLB screwed this up. The only way they could have messed this up any worse would to have been have the game feature the Indians against the Red Sox (because of the Red Sox horrendous past in regards to race and integration). Thankfully, that didn't happen, but still this can't count as a high point for MLB. Even when they try to do something good, they find a way to screw it up beyond reproach.

It's too bad that this happened on a weekend, when everyone is focusing on the Final Four and Opening Day and getting geared up for the The Masters next weekend, because this story pretty much got buried. I hope some one grabs a hold of it on Monday and screams about it. I hope they talk about it on sports talk radio, I hope it gets mentioned on PTI, I just hope people pay attention and recognize the sheer stupidity of MLB in this, because they deserve to get taken to the woodshed for this one.

So dear MLB, please continue the tradition you're trying to establish with this game. It's a great idea and could become a wonderful thing. But next time around, if you could use some of that pesky common sense that always seems to be escaping you, that would be great. I know it's asking a lot, to think before making a decision, but if that's something a 7-year old can handle, then I would certainly hope the people that turn the wheels in a billion dollar national entity could do the same.