Coolest home run ever hit-Done By a Pirate!

the last time I saw writing like that was a headline in SI on a story about Luis Tiant: El Tiante makes his peetch.

I work as a sports copy editor, so I’m alert to grammar in quotes that might make an athlete look dumb, especially if the athlete is from a non-English-speaking country soccer players, mainly). But it’s a fine line I walk, altering quotes. I have to weigh the relevance of allowing a player to sound uneducated or ethnic. You put your credibility on the line if people can watch or listen to a subject being interviewed and know his English is fractured, and then they read quotes in the paper and the guy is speaking the King’s English.

I don’t know that the writers of the ‘50s were deliberately trying to make fun of Roberto. Most of the them are gone, so we can’t ask. To play the Devil’s advocate a little though, that was a time when black and Latin players were just beginning to show up in any numbers in MLB, and I’m pretty certain most of the beat writers of the day (who certainly were overwhelmingly white) had probably never encountered many blacks from anywhere, much less island blacks who spoke mostly Spanish and struggled with English. It was a strange new world they were dealing with. They may have just thought it made their copy more colorful to quote these players exactly (as they had been doing with rural white guys — think of Dizzy Dean — and people like Berra and Stengle, whose pronouncements were sometimes indecipherable).

I’d just be really careful tossing around terms like “racism” without knowing what was in a guy’s heart.