The Nose-Counters at the New York Times — or Is it The Onion? — Try to Figure Out Who's On Third

Since it’s getting increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between news in the New York Times and parodies in The Onion, I thought I would perform a public service by giving you the opportunity to hone your source-spotting skills.

Here’s how a recent article begins about a “curious disparity” that, until now, you probably haven’t worried about very much. Is this an example of what the Times regards as news that’s fit to print, or is it an Onion parody?

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Baseball’s Praised Diversity Is Stranded at First Base

About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.

Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by….

You guessed The Onion, right? I mean, who else would write in apparent seriousness (as the article in question does a few paragraphs later) that “diversity among the third-base coaching ranks has been in decline for the past five years, from a peak of 12 in 2005 to 7 this season, and the racial disparity between first- and third-base coaches has increased,” an underrepresentation deemed so dire that it was accompanied by a sidebar with a graph showing “A Gap in the Coaching Boxes” of 43 percentage points and noting that “[t]he disparity between the percentage of minority first-base coaches and minority third-base coaches in Major League Baseball is greater than ever.”

Who else would write that “the bench coach position… is fairly diverse”? Since a position can’t be diverse, this must be parody. In fact, who but The Onion could publish a long article about the lack of diversity among third base coaches without once giving any reason why diversity among third base coaches is important. Are their distinctive black and Hispanic ways of giving, say, run or hold signs?

Well, if you guessed The Onion, you’re wrong. This lamentation of the large and growing third base coaching gap is from the New York Times.

Now you can rightly complain that I cheated a little. If I’d quote a bit more of this long article it would have been easier for you to spot the distinctive Times faux-reasonable, unnamed source, unnamed expert-quoting style.

Current and former minority coaches and managers said they had noticed the disparity for years, but none attributed it to racism. Instead, some of the former coaches, along with diversity experts, questioned whether race may be playing a more subtle role, with minorities routinely funneled into a job at first base that is less demanding than the one at third.

“It’s very easy for them to put the minority at first base, to say we have a minority and we hire minorities,” said Al Bumbry, a black former player who was a first-base coach for the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians.

The Times, of course, would never slant an article to argue or imply that owners or managers of anything are racist. No, the Times is much more restrained and reasonable, pointing out that none of its sources attributed this large and growing “disparity” to racism while favorably quoting a named source who blamed “them” for routinely funneling minorities into a less demanding position that “gets less respect” and then patting themselves on the back for hiring minorities.

And then there’s the always reliable “some,” as in:

Some in baseball said managers, consciously or not, often select third-base coaches with whom they have a similar background because they believe they can work effectively with them, particularly at crucial moments.

The Times would never accuse any organization of racism, but “some” do.

The Times also famously likes academic experts, quoting one of them,”Roberto González Echevarría, a professor at Yale who has written about baseball,” who claims:

When minorities were first given coaching jobs in the 1960s, they often ended up as first-base coaches. They didn’t want to put them at third base to give the signs…

Diversity experts said although 42 percent of base coaches were minorities, the proportion of minorities to whites should be constant at each level of an organization and reflect the overall makeup of its workforce….

This must be The Onion after all, since the Times, of course, doesn’t believe in quotas, and its editors would never allow its reporters to endorse the opinions of unnamed “diversity experts” who demand proportional representation, even in baseball.

You can’t make this stuff up. But the New York Times certainly can.