Mascot Name Mistaken for Slur at Rockies Game

CLAY: I just wanted to end with a funny, ridiculous story as people roll into the rest of their Monday — and I don’t even know if you have hardly seen this, Buck. But over the weekend at the Colorado Rockies game there was a guy sitting right behind home plate. There was a black player batting, and people decided to have this clip go viral because they thought the man was yelling a racial slur at the batter. Now, this would be one of the all-time worst decisions for anyone to make literally on camera, directly behind home plate at the Colorado Rockies. Yelling a racial slur at that black baseball player would be career ending, almost life ending.

BUCK: You’d be ostracized. You’d be ostracized, living in like a cabin somewhere with no running water or electricity ’cause nobody would ever talk to you. It’s like, you’re done.

CLAY: Yeah. But we were talking about this earlier like the sports connection. Buck, so many people in the sports universe desperately desire for there to be racism. It’s not just sports, but certainly sports is a part of it, and the blue check brigade immediately made this clip go viral, and they said, “Just look at this blatant racism! How in the world can the Colorado Rockies allow this to happen?”

I’m not making this story up, for those of you haven’t heard it. The Rockies did an investigation into this man and what he was yelling, and it turns out he was yelling, “Dinger,” D-i-n-g-e-r — as in a home run — which is the name of the mascot of the Colorado Rockies (laughing) And the mascot was on the other side of home plate and he was trying to get the mascot’s attention.

Now, Buck, you could still say (laughing), “Where is a grown man without a child trying to get the attention of the mascot to such an extent?” But if this isn’t a perfect Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, I just tweeted out the video if you guys want a laugh. We need the Curb music in the background. But after an exhaustive investigation, there was no racial slur being screamed, being yelled on camera, on television right behind home plate. It was just a guy trying to get the attention of the mascot.

BUCK: Yet again the hypersensitivity tells you something, doesn’t it? When you have these instances where everyone freaks out, one, it goes to show you that it would not be even a little bit tolerated or acceptable. So that’s one part of it. And the other is that we seem to find a lot of these cases of public racism, whether it’s an alleged noose in a public park —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — that turned out to actually be a piece of exercise equipment or a noose that’s a door pull on a NASCAR door which people are using as a rope to pull down the door. I mean, whatever it may be, we find — and never mind the Jussie Smollett situation, which, as we all know, that was just an intelligence test. If you believed Jussie Smollett, it’s time to, like, read more books and try to think harder. But people believed him, some people did.

CLAY: The demand for racism exceeds the supply in this country right now.

BUCK: Yeah.