MLB teams
Howard Bryant, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

For the Orioles locker room, riots in Baltimore cross color lines

MLB, Baltimore Orioles

This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's June 8 World Football Issue. Subscribe today!

"I WAS HOPING someone would bring it up," Orioles manager Buck Showalter says during batting practice at Yankee Stadium before a recent game. "There was this young African-American kid, and I don't know how he got into the press conference because I think his credential had expired. He was shy, but you could tell he wanted to ask something, and I wanted to talk about it. Absolutely. Get it out there."

"It" was Baltimore: Freddie Gray ending up dead in police custody; the protests and the fires; the reaction by the state of Maryland to deploy the National Guard and impose curfews; baseball's decision that the Orioles should play a home game with no fans in attendance.

There is no escape from the widening class and racial fractures dividing America, and although the Black Lives Matter movement has been conspicuous for its absence of white athletes as much as for the reappearance of the socially conscious black player, Showalter did not try to escape. He did not condescend. He respected the road not his: "It's a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, 'Why don't they do this?' You've never been black, OK, so slow down a bit." The Orioles' John Angelos is still the only sports executive in America to tell those in a poor, black community that a city's teams belong to them too.

Upstairs, in the Yankee Stadium press lounge, former Orioles manager and native Brooklynite Lee Mazzilli is appalled by the legacy of police corruption but is also perplexed by Baltimore, incongruously angered by the Rev. Al Sharpton. "I understand the frustration, but could someone explain to me why people burn down their own neighborhoods?" he asks. "I mean, they still gotta live there."

Downstairs in the visiting clubhouse is All-Star center fielder Adam Jones, who once posed for the cover of this magazine taking a selfie with a Baltimore policeman, whose fraternity includes six facing charges in Gray's death. Under the shadow of macro-aggression between police and Baltimore's black community, Jones recalls annoying micro-aggressions in black life, like the time at the Mercedes-Benz dealership when he eyed the S65 AMG coupe and the salesman hesitated, convinced there was no possible way black Adam Jones could afford a $230,000 car. "He kept telling me how expensive the car was, mentioned it was over $100,000," says Jones, who will make over $13 million this year. "I told him, 'I already own the sedan, but I haven't sat in the coupe.' Everyone wants to tell black people how to act, but they have no idea what it is to be black."

Across from Jones is shortstop J.J. Hardy, who is white, making his season debut that night after missing 25 games to a shoulder injury. His eyes glaze at yet another injury question. I ask him about the Baltimore uprising. "I'd rather," he says, smiling, "you asked me about my shoulder."

This is the soil that needs to be tilled, turned over, worked. Get it out there. In the 1960s, Tim McCarver, the son of a Memphis policeman, confronted his prejudices as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals not just because of friendships with Lou Brock, Bob Gibson and Bill White but because he was part of a group of powerful personalities. The Cardinals of the 1960s, as America roiled and chose sides, wanted to know one another as competitors but also as men. "I was embarrassed to admit it, but so much was true. I didn't want to drink off the same straw as a black man," McCarver says. "So much of it was subconscious, but the guys on that team, well, they made you see yourself."

Maybe, behind closed doors, these conversations are again taking place, Jones' white teammates becoming outraged and molded by Jones' story of being profiled at a car dealership. Maybe these conversations will show them that the fight belongs to everyone and serve as a reminder that pretending we live in America the Post-Racial is one dangerous exercise in denial. Maybe there is at least hope in that.

"This is where they should happen," Showalter says. "Sports is supposed to be ahead of the other parts of society because you have to know each other, have to work toward that goal, every day, all day. If we could use sports more as a model more often of what is possible, we'd have a lot fewer problems. I believe that."

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