The recent baseball etiquette lessons continued in San Francisco Friday night, as Philadelphia’s Shane Victorino was hit by an purpose pitch by Giants reliever Ramon Ramirez, apparently as payback for Jimmy Rollins stealing second with a 6 run lead moments earlier (keep in mind, this was only the 6th inning). Though I’m amongst those who consider the thin-skinned policing of baseball’s unwritten rules to be kinda immature (though wildly entertaining), my outrage doesn’t extend to publicly labeling Ramirez “an illegal alien”. That’s just one manner in which I part ways with nationally syndicated radio host Tony Bruno, who aimed the above slur at Ramirez via Twitter shortly following the brief Phillies/Giants brawl. Though Bruno quickly removed the offending post, he took to his Facebook page late last night to defend himself.
Saddened to see the vulture mentality and bad knowledge by the many who have joined the sheep on facebook,twitter and blogs who did not hear my radio show yet jump to conclusions about me without knowing a single thing about me or my 40 year career. My stupid and insensitive twitter post was up less than 1 minute before I realized it was caustic, it was removed immediately and I typed a quick apology on twitter and here.
Many have whipped themselves into a frenzy of hate with vile, profane and even threats of violence in their “copy and paste” world of instant justice. I will spare you the embarassment of reposting these truly ugly messages. Others who feel my apologies and body of work aren’t good enough for their “selective morality” have called for my dismissal.
I know who and what I am and deal with many who post racist and insensitive comments all the time and hide behind a lie of being hacked or simply not caring what people say. I don’t hide behind anything I have ever said or done.
The fact that 2 or 3 people who want to destroy my life are fanning the flames of true hate by spreading this all over the world wide web just disappoints me as someone who prides himself on being a man who embraces all races, religions and opinions. Most of my rational thinking audience and followers can attest to that fact.
Bruno fails to acknowledge that his comment about Ramirez wasn’t merely “caustic” ; though the host is hardly alone in taking umbrage with Bruce Bochy ordering an intentional HBP, what any of that has to do with Ramirez’ lineage is a point the sports yack veteran fails to address. Perhaps because there’s no reasonable excuse. Congrats, Tony, on not claiming you were hacked, but deleting the tweet surely indicates something was written and published which you wished to avoid defending.
Much of Bruno’s Facebook non-apology dodged the real issue, instead focusing on calling Bochy a coward (“should we start teaching little leaguers to throw at the big kid on the other team when he hits a couple of home runs because your son couldn’t get him out?”), which is more than a little disingenuous. Bruno must realize that no matter how popular Bochy is in the Bay Area, no one is making death threats or calling for a talk show host to be canned simply because he criticized a manager.