![]() ![]() While the game has grown more diverse overall-41% of players today are of color, according to MLB statistics-Latin Americans have made up most of that growth. “I don’t think there’s a black guy that’s up that high in baseball that they could drag in and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think we should do to this guy?’ ” he says. He did not appeal the suspension, he says, because there would have been no point. But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game, and I feel like I’m getting to a point to where I need to change the game.” “I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson,” he says. Anderson plays a white man’s game, and he plays it in a white man’s Band-Aid. “We got bigger problems.” But it is symbolic of his place in his sport in 2019. After the Royals series, he tore up his left thumb sliding into second in Detroit, so he dug around in the team first-aid kit until he found a one-inch dot the color of flesh-someone else’s flesh. “That’s a word that’s in my vocabulary,” he says. He doesn’t think baseball’s mostly white hierarchy should be allowed to tell him when and how he can use a word that for two centuries has been used to oppress his people. He doesn’t think he deserved to be suspended. Major League Baseball suspended Keller five games for throwing at Anderson and Anderson for one game for what it called his “conduct”: He had allegedly called Keller, who is white, a “weak-ass f- n-.” When Anderson came up next, leading off the sixth, Kansas City pitcher Brad Keller fired a 92-mph fastball at his backside, and the benches cleared. ![]() ![]() As he was leaving the batter’s box, Anderson spun to face his dugout, and he fired his bat toward it in triumph before rounding the bases. The moon shot became notable for what would follow it. On April 17, in the fourth inning of a lightly attended home day game, he cracked a two-run homer to deep left to put Chicago up on the Royals. Most days, he keeps this problem to himself. He says he feels out of place in baseball, like he belongs on the field but not in the game. For Anderson, though, this is not just a matter of statistics. Is the only African-American on the White Sox roster, making him one of only 72 black players in a game that, percentage-wise, was more than twice as black as recently as 1994. “It’s like, What’s up, dude? What’s up, man? How you doin’ today? Because we don’t have nothing in common.” He doesn’t speak Spanish he doesn’t hunt or fish “My conversation is limited over there,” he says. Tim Anderson’s baseball life is often a lonely one-even when he’s on first base, usually the most social stop on the diamond. ![]()
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