Rockies chairman and CEO Charlie Monfort added: “I don’t want to offend anyone, but I think character-wise we’re stronger than anyone in baseball. Christians, and what they’ve endured, are some of the strongest people in baseball. I believe God sends signs, and we’re seeing those.”
In his June 2 “Edge of Sports” column, sportswriter Dave Zirin takes on the Rockies management. Commenting on Monfort’s above statement, Zirin responds:
“Assumedly, Shawn Green (Jew), Ichiro Suzuki (Shinto), or any of the Godless players from Cuba don’t have the ‘character’ Montfort is looking for. Also, there are only two African-American players on the Rockies active roster. Is this because Montfort doesn’t think Black players have character? Does the organization endorse the statement of their stadium’s namesake William Coors, who told a group of black businessmen in 1984 that Africans ‘… lack the intellectual capacity to succeed, and it’s taking them down the tubes’? These are admittedly difficult questions. But they are the questions that need to be posed when the wafting odor of discrimination clouds the air.”
Subsequent comments from Rockies management and players in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News dispute some assertions in the USA Today article, including the “Christian-based code of conduct.”
One letter to the editor of USA Today argues “The time and place for religion is in our private lives, not in our sports community.” And another letter argues in favor of separation of church and state on this matter, asking “Did all taxpayers help to fund these billion-dollar stadiums, or just conservative Christians?”
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