Colin Cowherd, Pedro Martinez
Last week, ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd offended Dominicans with his on-air comments, but Pedro Martínez had the best answer to put him in his place. Getty

Why can’t people accept that Latinos are making it big and be happy for us? We work our behinds off in everything we do, we take the jobs that other people wouldn’t dare to do just so we can start somewhere, we figure out our lives in a totally new language and on top of all the adversities, we succeed. Why is that success so hard to understand for some people? Take Colin Cowherd. The ESPN Radio host was trying to prove his point that baseball isn’t too complicated by using an example that was offensive to Dominicans, to say the least.

“I’ve never bought into that, ‘Baseball is too complex,’ ” Cowherd said. “A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic.” So he’s saying that baseball is not complex because Dominicans play it? “The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world class academic abilities,” Cowherd said. “A lot of those kids come from rough backgrounds and have not had opportunities academically that other kids from other countries have.” While yes, there are kids who don’t have the same opportunities, that doesn’t mean that they don’t work hard to make something out of their lives.

For not having “world class academic abilities” they sure know how to negotiate million-dollar contracts and they were smart enough to find a way out of poverty through sports, which is better than falling into the hands of drug-dealing or any other easy-money, illicit business. However, there are Dominican athletes like Al Horford, Felix Sanchez, Eloy Vargas and Francisco García, among many others, who have gone to college; and an outstanding baseball player who grew up with nothing but made one of the most successful careers in the sport and also went to college: Pedro Martínez.

Martínez was indicted in the Baseball Hall of Fame over the weekend and had the perfect comments regarding Cowherd’s remarks: “I’m sorry. He needs to get to my level to answer him,” Pedro said. “I’m in the Hall of Fame.” After saying he doesn’t even know who Cowherd is, he elaborated: “Yes, we are a third-world country. Yes, we don’t have the resources to be more educated, but you know what? Every once in a while you’re going to get one like me, that’s not afraid to face you guys, to tell you how educated or uneducated or uneducated I am, how proud I am of becoming who I am. We’re not going to stop and go back to probably the third-world country that we were 30 years ago. We want to go forward. We’re looking forward.”

In case you were wondering about Cowherd, he did get fired from ESPN after his offensive comments, and has since joined Fox.

© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.