ESPN continues its trend of injecting left-wing politics into its coverage of events in the sporting world. This time, the network's Spanish-language service decided to add its political two cents to its coverage of MLB legend Ivan "Pudge" Rodríguez' induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This is how ESPN Deportes' Enrique Rojas opened a ludicrous report titled "Pudge Rodríguez: The Last Puerto Rican In Cooperstown?"
The veteran catcher Ivan Rodríguez, who is part of the Class of 2017 of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, could be the last Puerto Rican to enter baseball's most sacred quarter in the United States.
This would happen if the intent of a political group on the island which seeks to convert Puerto Rico in the 51st state of the United States comes to fruition. Rodríguez is a member of a commission created by the Puerto Rican government to promote the idea of 'statehood' before the United States Congress. (This is) a plan that would basically obliterate the concept of "Puerto Rican" as we currently know it.
ESPN's alienation of its viewers due to the pervasive left-wing political bias of its English-language programming is already a matter of record, but this virus now seems to have also spread to the network's Deportes brand. There is no other way to explain an article that hijacks a Hall of Famer's induction in order to put him on the spot over a personal political position that is disfavored by the extreme Left...in this case, Rodríguez' public support for the admission of Puerto Rico as the 51st state of the Union.
The Left, in this case, continues to be enamored with a romantic notion of independence for Puerto Rico, the highest expression of which is its outright recent worship of FALN bombmaker Oscar López Rivera. Anyone who does not fall in line with this vision for Puerto Rico's future is ostracized by the leftist media, and their accomplishments take a back seat to the preferred ideology.
Rojas attempts to deligitimize Rodríguez' position on the future of Puerto Rico by suggesting that an ongoing Puerto Rican identity would somehow vanish upon admission to the United States, which in itself suggests that this identity is solely contingent upon maintaining a political status separate from the United States. Had Rojas bothered to explore the post-statehood identity question with any one of Pudge's fans in Arlington, Texas, he would have quickly learned that that dog don't hunt. Rojas' "last Puerto Rican" point does not survive even the slightest scrutiny.
Not only is the concept of Rodríguez as "the last Puerto Rican" a fallacy...it is also irrelevant to the question of his induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rodríguez, the best defensive catcher of all time if not the outright GOAT, was ultimately inducted as a Texas Ranger. There is no separate Hispanic wing of the Hall of Fame, so questions surrounding Puerto Rico's status are not germane to the issue of Pudge's play.
Rodríguez is guilty of nothing more than exercising his uniquely American right to petition the government for redress of grievances on behalf of the nearly 3.5 million U.S. citizens currently living on the island of Puerto Rico, a majority of whom desire to throw off the island's remaining colonial shackles in order to enter into the fullness of their American citizenship with all its attendant rights and responsibilities.
Given ESPN's virtuous championing of those who fight for equality, you'd think that Rodríguez would draw far better coverage. Unfortunately, some equalities are more equal than others.
