Monday, July 27
Intelligent, original, articulate, funny. Colin Cowherd is all of these things.
He's also out of a job for right now after ESPN fired him because they didn't appreciate a snide comment he made about the Dominican Republic.
Cowherd said, "I've never bought into that baseball is too complex. Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic."
ESPN, reflecting the paralyzing political correctness theme going through American, issued their standard statement following Cowherd's firing saying, "Colin Cowherd's comments over the past two days do not reflect the values of ESPN or our employees. Colin will no longer appear on ESPN."
ESPN values? It's that why they employ Ray Lewis and have had countless sexual harassment incidents?
If Cowherd would have made that remark privately in a bar he might have drawn some drunken laughs. But because he already announced he was leaving ESPN at the end of this month with a likely move to FOX Sports, the self-appointed arbitrators of good taste at ESPN, chose to hang Cowherd out to dry. They did it on a throwaway remark that was more flippant than mean. This was grandstanding by ESPN.
Now I'm not condoning what Cowherd said, but the Dominican Republic does have one of the worst education systems in the world due to overcrowded classrooms, shoddy facilities, high dropout rates and lack of teachers. Two international organizations - UNESCO and the World Forum - ranked the Dominican Republic's primary education as the worst in the Central American and Caribbean region in a 2010 report.
Not only do ballplayers from that region coming to America have to overcome low-rated education, but they have to try to pick up English as a second language. That's a difficult parlay. So is it totally wrong what Cowherd said?
I find Cowherd's comments less offensive than ESPN employing Lewis and Mike Golic. Lewis is lucky to have escaped prison while the simplistic Golic has never made a comment that wasn't totally obvious.
On the handicapping front, I'm going for my ninth straight Triple Star regular-season premium play baseball winner today. I am on a 13-5 run on my last 18 regular-season premium baseball plays and believe I have found another winner with this mispriced matchup. The play and my packages can be found here: /pregamepros/pro-bettor/bettor.aspx?id=7746#capper.
As always, let's have no bad luck!