Reuters
Regardless of what you think of Dusty Baker as a baseball manager and whether or not you agree with the Reds’ decision to fire him today, this report from Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com is sad/depressing:
Baker quite likely started to sense that maybe his time was up in Cincinnati. Maybe that’s why he said what he said. “The last couple weeks, I’ve been getting a rash of hate mail, racial mail,” he said. “Maybe it is time to go.”
“This is really ugly,” he said. “There are all sorts of references to Barack Obama. So now I know where they are coming from. I don’t know, maybe people are mad at him, so they don’t like the idea of blacks in authority.”
Ultimately the Reds fired Baker because his teams didn’t have enough playoff success and he clashed with upper management on some key topics, which Heyman details in his article. However, setting aside all the baseball stuff and focusing more on the human being stuff … man, that’s really discouraging.