Yankees center fielder Jazz Chisholm Jr. believes baseball is not a sport for him because of his skin color and feels that everything would be different if he were white.“I don’t want to say this: baseball is a white man’s sport,” he told The Athletic. “I feel like white people criticize everything a black man does. Black men are outspoken. They say what they think,” he added.
The Bahamian player understands that the unwritten rules of this sport forbid him to wear jewelry on the field when he wears two earrings and chains with diamond inlays of his favorite characters. He also believes that, according to those rules, he should not overdo it with home runs and he always does.
“The unwritten rules of baseball are white,” he said of the sport’s arbitrary set of standards, many of them rooted in a time before integration. “And I always broke the unwritten rules of baseball,” Chisholm added.
With the Yankees, Chisholm can be himself
The Athletic notes that despite everything, the outspoken player with a strong personality has found acceptance in a seemingly unexpected place: the Yankees, who until last month enforced a facial hair policy that for many represented the strictest of baseball’s mores.
However, with the Bahamian player, the New York team has come to an understanding. Even the team’s manager, Aaron Boone and the quirky player had a funny moment of connection two weeks after the Yankees signed him in a trade at the deadline last season.
Boone danced to the beat of an ’80s song, something Chisholm noticed immediately. “Look, I’m about to go to the plate right now and hit a home run,” Chisholm promised his new manager. “I’m going to come back and do that little dance.”
Chisholm did, hitting a 416-foot shot to the Yankees bullpen against the Texas Rangers, and before shaking hands with his teammates in the dugout, the player pointed to Boone and did the same footwork routine that his manager had done an inning earlier. This made Boone laugh
The Athletic notes that while the Yankees have a deserved reputation for stifling individuality, the team’s manager felt it was important to let Chisholm know that he would accept him as he was and that he should not feel pressured to stop being himself, a message he conveyed to him on trade day in their first phone call.
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