I hope it doesn’t have much to do with him being black, but it very well might. Especially the attitude. I still think people in Minnesota who don’t follow top prospects closely think he and Dukes are the same person. When they see the headline “Devil rays prospect in trouble” they think “oh, it must be that black kid they have”

And that’s why I’ll continue to write these diatribes.

Also, you raise an excellent point. Why in blazes is Slama not in the majors right now?

a. Delmon Young is not a “Twins product” b. If he succeeds will take playing time (and career time after 2010) off the Twins’ media darling Cuddyer c. He is black

have a lot to do with that.

At this point of his career, Young has better numbers than Gladden amassed in 11 years in the bigs and Gladden did not play big league ball until he was 25. This says a lot. We are talking about players like Slam as the future of the Twins. Slama is 2 years older than Young. I suspect since he never made it to the bigs by then, let’s write him off.

I just don’t understand that ineptitude by certain people…

Actually, he’d probably do it to me, since I wrote the original post and old people don’t understand what “a comment” is.

Oh well. I think it’s a possibility, and I’m going to go ahead and accuse Reusse of it. (Like I did in the article.) I just hope it’s not a popular opinion/motivation for Delmon-hate.

As far as his being “uncoachable”, I think it is just as likely that he is unwilling to listen to bad coaching. Which I would argue is a good thing. Just because he isn’t smiling all the time doesn’t mean he has a bad attitude. Plenty of athletes treat the game as a job and teammates as co-workers. I don’t have a problem with that. The only reason this is an issue is because he isn’t producing, people can’t pinpoint it (injury, a visible hitch in his swing, etc) so they pull out the “he doesn’t want to be coached” card. That must be the reason for his lack of production. Or maybe he really isn’t very good. He is 23 years old.

Most of the people I talk to who hate Delmon Young, also really, really love Michael Cuddyer. He was pretty terrible at 23. Why didn’t we give up on him? He was also a very high draft pick? I’m not sure why Delmon is so hated, maybe its because we didn’t draft him? Who really knows. There might be some deep seeded racism there he’s just another “black thug from California” whereas Cuddyer is a nice smiley kid from Virginia. This is obviously speculation and hopefully I don’t end up getting yelled at by Ken Rosenthal for calling everyone a racist.