Selig Has Dropped the Ball in His Response to McLane

Al Campanis said African Americans may not have some of the necessities to be baseball managers, which is very painful to hear if you’re African American. But imagine if you’re Latino and you hear that the owner of the Houston Astros believes, or at least a couple of people say he believes, that you don’t even have the necessities to be a baseball fan.

You’d be “deeply, deeply offended,” which is how longtime Dodger broadcaster Jaime Jarrin described his feelings after reading comments allegedly made last week by Drayton McLane.

Jarrin also said that he was angry enough to contact editorial boards of local newspapers and the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists as part of an anti-McLane campaign. No matter what Latinos might or might not understand about baseball, Jarrin wants to make sure they know what McLane understands about them.

“This is really racism,” Jarrin said. “It’s worse than anything Campanis said.”

It is at least as bad--if indeed McLane did make the comments, which he says he didn’t.

That is disputed by two executives from Houston’s KTMD-Channel 48 Telemundo, Vice President and General Manager Marco Camacho and sales manager Rod Rodriguez, who said McLane made the comments to them before a dinner in his honor Thursday night in Houston.

“We asked him why he didn’t market toward Hispanics,” Camacho said. “He said it was hard to reach Hispanics because the game of baseball is strategy and skill and it’s complicated and that’s why more Hispanics don’t go to Astros games.

“He said that baseball is a game of statistics and numbers and people like to follow baseball in the newspapers and Hispanics don’t read newspapers and when Hispanics do go, they buy the cheap $2 seats.”

Such thinking, whether it is McLane’s or not, is so absurd that it shouldn’t be dignified with a rebuttal.

So I won’t mention that Felipe Alou is perhaps the game’s best manager, that there are too many Latino stars on the field to list, that 14 teams--among them the Astros--have Spanish-language radio affiliates, that Latinos account for 12% of major league baseball’s attendance and that all 27,000-plus tickets for the San Diego-Colorado season opener in Monterrey, Mexico sold out within five hours.

Considering baseball’s large Latino constituency, not to mention the inappropriateness of the alleged comments, you might think Commissioner Bud Selig would be call for a quick and thorough investigation.

At least he was quick.

After talking to McLane, but not to the television executives who reported the comments on their station’s news Thursday night, Selig released a statement Friday calling McLane “one of the most honorable, sensitive and dedicated” men in baseball and “one of the finest men I have ever had the privilege to call a friend.

“It is an outrage that he would be targeted for this kind of slander by any media outlet. . . . He has my full support and the support of everyone in baseball.”

I can understand that Selig might have difficulty arriving at a conclusion. Unlike Marge Schott, who was fined $25,000 and banned from baseball for a year for slurs toward African Americans and Jews, McLane did not make his comments over the air and then reiterate them in a taped interview with a national magazine.

This was a “he said, they said” situation.

But Selig should have at least called the television executives for their version before concluding they were guilty of slander. That’s the real slander.

“How can you come up with a decision without investigating?” Jarrin said. “Of course, Drayton McLane is going to deny he said these things. He’s going to cover up. You also have to talk to the other people who were there.

“There’s a double standard. If this had been about blacks, it wouldn’t have been dismissed so quickly. But the blacks have more political power than we do. We’ve been too pacific. We have to do something this time.

“I’m tired of sitting on the back seat of the bus.”

Rich Levin, major league baseball’s spokesman, said Monday that he respects Jarrin, a Dodger broadcaster for 41 years and a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame, but defended Selig’s defense of McLane.

Meantime, the Astro owner has thrown everyone a curve.

After releasing a statement demanding an apology from the Houston television executives, he called a news conference and acknowledged that he said the things he was reported to have said but denied that he had confined his remarks to Latinos.

“I was talking about everybody,” he said. “I’ve had lots in my family that I had to teach baseball to.

“It was never meant to be about Hispanics. It was meant for everyone.”

Oh, so we’re all too dumb to follow baseball.

I feel better now.

Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.