Local Snobs Bash Newest Mariner
After years of insisting that “good citizens” were the key to winning ballclubs, the Mariners have hired one of baseball’s notorious bad guys, Carl Everett.
The move improves the Mariners offense (whether the degree of improvement is worth Everett’s reported $3.4 million salary is in question). It’s also exposed an ugly vein of local intellectual elitism.
The move was a poorly-kept secret so already the local Internets are buzzing with commentary—and laughter. Because, besides getting in the occasional fight, Carl Everett is not a very learned man.
Several years ago, a Sports Illustrated reporter elicited some very silly comments from Everett, a fervent believer in literal interpretation of the Bible. The most oft-quoted is his dinosaur-denial:
"God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve," Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. "The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can't say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex."What about dinosaur bones?
"Made by man," he says.
What fun to laugh at Carl’s ignorance! Over at Slog, and at U.S.S. Mariner, broadband-access having, magazine-reading, white-collar-job having Seattleites are yukking it up in the comments, at Everett's expense.
It’s shitty. Everett is a major league baseball player with a high school education. He gets paid millions of dollars to hit baseballs, not study the Mesozoic. Ask the average paleontologist about the intricacies of identifying a slider and you’d get just as stupid a response.
Everett grew up in Tampa’s Highland Pines neighborhood, one of the poorest in the nation. In USA Today, Everett’s high school coach, David Pittman, describes it:
"If you could have seen where he came up in that neighborhood, good God," Pittman says. "I used to drive in that area, but not too often at night. If you weren't packing, you'd better buy something when you come out of there."I'll never forget the first night when I dropped [Everett] off. He said, 'Coach, do you know that Boston bar right up the street? Well, if you stop there on a red light, they'll take your car, and I don't know what will happen to you. You wait back, and when that light turns yellow, you take off and get out of here.'”
So maybe he wasn’t spending his childhood assembling wooden dinosaur kits and going to the Burke Museum (like we did), but rather avoiding gunfire and trying to find something to eat.
Does poverty and under-education excuse ignorance? No. And Everett’s checkered past also includes charges of child abuse. But no one is asking Carl Everett to chair the next meeting of the National Academy of the Arts and Sciences—just to hit baseballs. He doesn’t deserve ridicule for his beliefs, however dumb they are. As Everett's Bible says (and we paraphrase): "Judge not, lest ye be judged."
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