Baker Takes Talk Show Heat Over Comments

After reading Joan Walsh defending the ill-advised comments about race from Chicago Cubs’ manager Dusty Baker (Opinion, July 13), it struck me as more an attack on his critics than an objective defense of Baker. She mentions only his comments about blacks being able to “take the heat,” but never mentions the rest where he condones such slander against blacks because he’s black himself. Are Jews exempt from criticism when they make anti-Semitic comments about other Jews? Do Asians get a special dispensation when they slander Asians? No, they do not.

A manager is supposed to set an example for his team -- a team already tainted by the Sammy Sosa bat controversy -- and not become a distraction. Walsh, it’s clear, doesn’t know this because she’s too busy attacking “demagogues” like Rush Limbaugh. Her friendship with Baker, therefore, makes her analysis of his far-reaching racial views so much dust in the wind.

John Primavera

San Diego

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It is unfair for Walsh to blame right-wing punditry for Baker’s predicament. It is the political left that has made racial hypersensitivity a national matter, not the right. Conservatives are protesting the double standard that would have made a white manager a disgraced has-been, had he uttered the same innocuous -- if politically incorrect -- words. Instead of calling for punishment, the right should give the kind-hearted Dusty the pass he deserves and refuse to play the left’s corrosive game.

Vincent Basehart

Los Angeles