Gary Sheffield was half-right, which is a lot different from Derek Jeter being "half-black.''
Sheffield was right that Joe Torre plays favorites. He favors the players who won him the four rings.
Torre loves Jeter best of all. He'd love him if he was half-green, half-awake or half-in-the-bag. Because Jeter and Mariano Rivera are the two players most responsible for Torre's four rings.
Torre loves Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte, too, because they are the next three players most responsible for the four rings. Torre also loves those five players because they are quiet, professional gentlemen.
I suspect Torre didn't love Sheffield because he is neither quiet nor professional, and I suspect he likes him even less now because Sheffield won't shut up about how Torre mistreated him. And now it's about how Torre mistreated Sheffield because he's African-American and how he mistreats all African-American players.
Torre's favorite person on earth may be Bob Gibson, who is African-American. Torre talks about Gibson even more than Sheffield talks about Torre. Torre can't say enough good things about Gibson.
Torre loves Darryl Strawberry, who helped him win rings. Strawberry also played hard and didn't complain when he didn't always play. Like Jeter and the others who helped him win the rings, Strawberry is a gentleman. And Strawberry disagreed with Sheffield's assessment.
Now Sheffield says Kenny Lofton and Tony Womack feel the same way, and it turns out Sheffield isn't just blowing smoke about Lofton, as Lofton a day or two later agreed with Sheffield that Torre mistreats African-American players. But Lofton had two problems with the Yankees. One was that he didn't play up to his usual standards. The other is that he shared center field with Williams, who, as we know, was one of Torre's favorite players. Torre had a loyalty to Williams. If there was favoritism, he favored the four-time winner.
I am not anxiously waiting to see what Womack has to say, either. If anything, Torre gave Womack too many chances, too much rope. By the time Womack got to the Yankees, he just couldn't play, plain and simple. He was, in fact, one of the worst players in Major League Baseball.
Sheffield, on the other hand, was a star with the Yankees. And he still is. But that doesn't make him a keen sociologic observer, or even a gentleman. Because he is neither.
Sheffield's time with the Yankees was marked by four things:
1) The usual hard hitting and clutch base hits;
2) An embarrassing association with BALCO (don't forget, he's the guy who FedEx'd cash to BALCO -- is that because he thought he was getting Ben-Gay?);
3) A propensity to say dumb things (it's actually gotten worse since he left the Yankees, since, as a Yankee, he limited his dumb comments to the subject of how much more money he wanted); and,
4) A knack for loafing after balls hit to right field, which he did about as often as he hustled after them.
Torre consistently played Sheffield, and he consistently defended Sheffield (at least he did publicly). Torre had so much faith in Sheffield that he even played him at first base during the playoffs when Sheffield shouldn't have been playing first base for even a high school team.
Sheffield's litany of specific complaints about Torre appears to boil down to "a couple of meetings'' when Torre called out Sheffield. One time came after one especially egregious case of loafing, the other was either over more loafing or Sheffield failing to be on time. Rather than hail Torre for waiting to call him out until he had loafed for two straight years, Sheffield apparently decided this was an unforgivable act.
Sheffield's evidence is that Torre didn't call out the other stars, whom he treated "like men.'' Of course, the other stars are consistent hustlers like Jeter, Posada and Alex Rodriguez. When it came to loafing, Sheffield was in a class by himself.
But Sheffield thinks he does no wrong. In his mind, he is a great hustler. Maybe this stems from the fact that his previous managers -- and there have been many of them, since he's been traded more times than any Hall-of-Fame talent in history -- may never have said a thing. They just watched and delighted in Sheffield's hitting, and let the loafing go. Torre did, too, for two years.
But eventually, he had to bring it up. He had no choice. Sheffield's loafing had become embarrassing. So he made an example of Sheffield at a meeting or two. For that, apparently, he is a racist. (Although, in Sheffield's confused world, Sheffield said Torre is just a mistreater of blacks, not racist.)
Sheffield sees racism around every corner. He thinks MLB is racist for having more Latins and fewer blacks in the game than they used to. He thinks Torre is a racist for mentioning a mistake or two he made when he made about a hundred more. He sees racism everywhere, which is a shame because it diminishes real racism, which does occur in baseball.
Sheffield sees himself as a great player, a great leader and a great humanitarian, not to mention a hustler. And while he's moved from city to city, he's always resided in Fantasyland.
