Former Minnesota Twin and current New York Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson has come under fire for remarks he made to White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson.
The incident came during a game this weekend at Yankee Stadium, which saw the Bronx Bombers host the Chicago White Sox. During Saturday’s game, amid high tensions, Donaldson sarcastically referred to Anderson as ‘Jackie’, which Anderson claims had racist intentions behind it.
Tensions between Donaldson and Anderson were already high following an incident which occurred a week prior, when the Yankees were playing the White Sox in Chicago. In that game, Donaldson applied a hard tag on Anderson when he was a baserunner, which Anderson claims forced him off the base and resulted in him being out. After a brief altercation, the benches cleared, and they did so all of this weekend as well.
“I called him Jackie. He came out with an interview that says he’s the new Jackie Robinson… We’ve actually joked about that. I’ve said it to him in years past, not in any manor than just joking around.”-Josh Donaldson on his altercation with Tim Anderson pic.twitter.com/BJE1NqfP19
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) May 21, 2022
“My meaning of that is not any term trying to be racist by any fact of the matter,” Donaldson said this weekend. “Obviously, he deemed it disrespectful. And look, if he did, I apologize. That’s not what I was trying to do by any manner and that’s what happened.”
Donaldson’s reasoning is that he was simply referring to Anderson as the nickname he gave himself, as Anderson called himself “today’s Jackie Robinson” back in 2019. Of course, Robinson was monumental both in sports and society as he broke baseball’s color barrier back in 1947. His number 42 remains retired across the league.
https://twitter.com/NBCSWhiteSox/status/1528121376829280256
“He just made a disrespectful comment,” Anderson said. “Basically he was trying to call me Jackie Robinson. ‘What’s up, Jackie?’ I don’t play like that. I don’t really play at all. I wasn’t really going to bother nobody today, but he made the comment and you know it was disrespectful and I don’t think it was called for. It was unnecessary.”
“Usually you have inside jokes with people you get along with, not people who don’t get along at all,” White Sox closer Liam Hendricks said on Sunday. “So that statement right there [by Donaldson] was complete bulls**t.”
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