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editorial

No room for racism in Panamanian sports

FEDEBEIS needs to find new, more credible leadership

The standard procedures of serious baseball are brutal. Past laurels count for very little. Those who don't win must leave.

It would be easy enough to resort to such traditions and say that, since Panama went 0-3 in the World Baseball Classic, the leaders of our national baseball ruling body, FEDEBEIS, ought to resign. Maybe, for the sake of convenience, that's how it ought to be put.

However, to pretend that the leadership of FEDEBEIS is precisely analogous to the field manager of a losing Major League Baseball team would be sufficiently inaccurate to give rise to other inappropriate analogies in response, would unfairly denigrate efforts of which Panama ought to be proud, and would serve as a pretext to avoid a crucial discussion about something truly shameful.

Other analogies are also problematic. Big league owners never get sacked for fielding losing teams, it's true, but then we shouldn't hear FEDEBEIS leaders to claim any sort of ownership of the national baseball scene.

And yes, we are a small country with a much larger baseball profile than our population would indicate, and we ought to be justly proud of some of the triumphs, from the Little League level up, that have come to Panama within the framework of FEDEBEIS in recent years.

However, racism has no proper place in sports, and especially not in Panamanian sports. Professional manager and former major league star Roberto Kelly was the object of a racial slur at a FEDEBEIS meeting and PRD legislator Franz Wever, the president of FEDEBEIS, made a public defense of that slur. It was one of the reasons why Kelly quit on the eve of the World Baseball Classic, and in itself it is ample reason to oust Wever and the provincial leaders who allowed their meeting to degenerate into such vile trash talk. Even if Wever et al wish to put on pompous airs as if they were major league owners, recall that a few years ago Major League Baseball suspended one of the team owners for her obnoxious racist remarks.

If his colleagues in the legislature choose to block any investigation of Wever's alleged election crimes --- and they did --- that's a different scandal. If Martín Torrijos chooses to tolerate the sort of racism that was the legacy of his party's old antagonist Arnulfo Arias within the ranks of the PRD that he leads, that's another separate scandal. But everyone knows that Panamanian politics is a cesspool, and the fans have every right to expect and demand that our national baseball scene adopt much higher standards.

There are some other issues to raise at the proper time and place about FEDEBEIS and its effectiveness --- things like the failure of our brief experiment in professional winter baseball, the other reasons that led to Kelly's resignation, the paperwork failures that kept José Macías and Fernando Seguignol off of our national team, FEDEBEIS's small part in the long-running fiasco that's the Panamanian Olympic Committee and so on. None of these problems can be entirely laid at Wever's feet, but had he been doing his job properly he would have shown stronger leadership in greater efforts to surmount them. These matters, and the corrective measures that Panamanian baseball needs to take, most properly belong in the discussions about a post-Wever FEDEBEIS leadership and orientation. To concentrate on them now would only lead to blame-shifting with respect to secondary issues, a tactic that would be used to defend the indefensible.

There can be no defense, excuse or admissible explanation. The ugly racist epithet "negro de mierda" that was used against Kelly in a FEDEBEIS meeting chaired by Wever and the latter's subsequent attempt to explain it all away as just another popular expression are intolerable in the baseball culture. Both Wever and the provincial leaders who serve as the FEDEBEIS board of directors ought to resign now, so that the rebuilding process in the wake of scandal and defeat can begin at once.

Bear in mind…

Don't go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.

Bob Dylan

Woe to the magistrate who's the author of calamities or crimes against his fatherland and who is forced to defend himself before a people's tribunal against accusations that his fellow citizens direct against his conduct.

Simón Bolívar

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Virginia Woolf