David Sirota: How Baseball Explains Modern Racism

[marmar]

from truthdig:




How Baseball Explains Modern Racism

Posted on Sep 30, 2011
By David Sirota


Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive—and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.

Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.

Today, Major League Baseball games using the QuesTec computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.

This is exactly what Southern Methodist University’s researchers did when they examined more than 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008. Their findings say as much about the enduring relationship between sports and bigotry as they do about the synaptic nature of racism in all of American society. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_baseball_explains_modern_racism_20110930/

[Syrinx]

1. here we go...

[malthaussen]

2. Nice Sample Size

It's an interesting idea because the sample size is, for a change, statistically significant. The article pointed to by the link, however, doesn't give any numbers. Saying an umpire is "more likely to call close pitches" in alignment with the race of the pitcher is actually not very shocking news, but I wonder how much "more likely" it is. The actual study will probably be buried in some professional journal and read by three people...

-- Mal