Archive for the ‘Yunel Escobar’ Category

Well, this blowed up real good, didn’t it? Which isn’t to say that I would have expected otherwise, given the nature of what was written on Yunel Escobar’s eye black on Saturday. It’s a situation that demands comment, context, and, hopefully once the parties involved have spoken on the matter, contrition, followed a deep breath and a return to something resembling normalcy– and maybe some kind of suspension while we’re at it, depending on what exactly it is that we hear.

I don’t know. The Jays, at least, are taking steps in the right direction, having released the following statement regarding the incident:

The Toronto Blue Jays do not support discrimination of any kind nor condone the message displayed by Yunel Escobar during Saturday’s game. The club takes this situation seriously and is investigating the matter.

Alex Anthopoulos, Sr. VP Baseball Operations and General Manager will be available to the media tomorrow afternoon at Yankee Stadium and we expect him to be joined by Yunel Escobar, Manager John Farrell and Coach Luis Rivera. Details and location for the media availability will be announced tomorrow.

If you’ve somehow missed the gist of what I’m talking about, check the original post from below.

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Funny definitely isn’t the word I’d use, but it’s certainly odd that on the day where Brett Lawrie is declared a burgeoning icon in the city’s gay community, we might have a related incident on our hands, of a seriously ugly and unfortunate nature.

Above we have an image of Yunel Escobar taken on Saturday, which has been posted on Flickr by frequent Twitterer @James_in_TO. On the Flickr page he writes:

For those whose Spanish isn’t fluent, have never seen Scarface or fail at google, Yunel’s eyeblack “TU ERE MARICON” translates to “You’re a faggot”. There are some small Spanish locales where it translates to “pussy” not “faggot” but that’s a very small possibility.

Ugh.

Now, to be entirely clear, I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m entirely taking this at face value and could absolutely be wrong about the interpretation or the context. I’ve already received a tweet from @BanditDeW, who explains, “All the latin players I ever played with used that as a generic curse word. Not a slur directed at a specific class.”

That would provide some measure of relief, I suppose. And I think it’s only fair to point out such potential contradictions, because I don’t want to throw Escobar– or whoever put this on his eye black– under the bus without making it known that we really don’t know the context here, or enough about the language to draw any hard conclusions yet– or at least I don’t. Additionally, at least theoretically, this could be the work of Photoshop, I suppose, but I’ve spoken with James on the internet, I know he’s not just some random, and personally, I have little reason not to believe that what we’re seeing here is real– and I’ve just had it confirmed from the video of Saturday’s game that, indeed, the phrase was there. (Other sources are finding other photos, too.)

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The YuniBomber

You get the feeling that Jon Morosi likes smothering his traffic bread in delicious Jays-fan butter, so it’s kinda of little surprise that he’s rumour mongering once again today in his latest for Fox Sports, as he tosses this nugget into the Jays section of his team-by-team breakdown of the up-for-grabs AL East:

In the near term, keep an eye on shortstop Yunel Escobar. Once prospect Adeiny Hechavarria arrives in the majors — which could happen any day now — the Blue Jays will have the flexibility to move Escobar for pitching. The A’s, Mariners and Pirates are possible trade partners, because they have pitching depth and a lack of production at shortstop.

It’s interesting, though.

I mean, I suppose that moving Escobar would make total sense if the Jays if they felt that his overall numbers this season– a .300 OBP and .275 wOBA– reflected his true talent level, because that’s probably about what you can expect from Hechavarria, who’d then improve the club with his otherworldly defence. But I don’t know why anybody would think that’s where Escobar is truly at.

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