On Tuesday’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” on ESP Radio and ESPNU, host Colin Cowherd brought up the Miami Marlins and their hiring of a manager who has never managed a professional baseball team and has not coached since he was a high school coach in Alabama in 1988.
According to Cowherd, baseball is not a sport that requires intelligence to play, since most players are from a poor country like the Dominican Republic or they do not have a college degree. Cowherd’s rationale is that these athletes can pick up a bat and a ball and play, while a sport like football requires large playbooks and memorization, ignoring the fact that MLB players and coaches use analytics, have binders of documented histories of opposing players and film sessions to pick up on tendencies.
“Baseball is full of rural kids; almost nobody’s got a college degree, managers or players, 3 percent, lowest percent of any professional league in America,” he explained. “A third of it’s Dominican and those players often come from what we would not consider world class educational backgrounds.”
He later quipped, “So this idea that baseball, a third of the sport now is Dominican, those kids often come from very limited educational backgrounds because of the economies of their countries. The other guys are a lot of kids just don’t even go to college. They go into the youth baseball pipe line, they get drafted; go right into the minor leagues. Stop pretending like this is the Ivy League of sports. I mean, let’s be honest. Now, with the globalization of baseball, the Asian players, managers can’t even communicate with a third of their roster. A lot of it’s just instincts. Here’s a ball, go hit, go pitch.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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