Marge Schott, for those of you who do not follow the National League, is the owner of a baseball team called the Cincinnati Reds.
She lets her dog - a St. Bernard - run loose on the field before games, figuring she pays the hired help enough to go out and clean up afterward. The animal also has free run of her offices, and she orders various employees to clean those messes, too.But that is all understandable. Having inherited a financial empire on the death of her husband, Schott, like many people who fall into money they did not - and could not - earn themselves, is predictably cheap and, at the same time, thoroughly contemptuous of those who do not have her financial holdings.
There are more stories about Schott's dog and her employees than there is room for in the newspaper you are holding, but perhaps it is enough for now to say that, as a human being, she is the closest thing we have to Imelda Marcos until Leona Helmsley gets out of the slammer.
At any rate, it develops that Schott was recently involved in a wrongful termination suit with a former employee, a man named Tim Sabo, who was the Reds' controller, and during the course of sworn testimony on that matter, a witness accused her of having called all-star Eric Davis and the great, inspirational slugger Dave Parker her "million-dollar niggers."
In her own deposition, Schott allowed that she had used the word "nigger" in her life but added that she had never asked anyone black if he found the word offensive. Meaning, I suppose, that the jury's still out on that one.
Anyway, when the news broke that Schott had called two of the National League's greatest ballplayers "million-dollar niggers," Hank Aaron, a high-ranking executive with the Atlanta Braves and the man who broke Babe Ruth's record for career home runs, went public with a call for an investigation.
"Baseball," he said in an interview with a Cincinnati newspaper, "must come forward and make it known to the world. We won't stand for this; there is no place for it in the national pastime."
And as much as I admire Aaron, the idea that the national pastime has no place for racism is ridiculous. In the first place, the national pastime used to be racism, and while it has headed underground since the days of "Amos and Andy," it is still alive and kicking in every economic, social and racial layer of the country.
Baseball included.
Schott does not need to be investigated - it takes two minutes to see everything you need to know. You don't have to investigate hate; there is enough of it lying there in plain view.
She needs to be shunned.