March of the xenophobes

 God bless Kevin Cash, the manager of your Tampa Bay Rays. He gets this whole All-Star business, what it's about (marketing) and who it's for (the fans).

That's why tonight, as manager of the American Leaguers, he'll send Shohei Ohtani to the bump as the AL's starting pitcher. And why Ohtani swing the bat for the AL.

After all, a baseball attraction doesn't get much more glittering than the Japanese pitcher/slugger, who's given a weary game a mighty injection of wow this summer. This is because Ohtani, who wields a high-octane arm and a high-octane bat, is doing things no one's seen since Babe Ruth was still gettin' 'em out and hittin' 'em out in his Boston Red Sox days.

Alas, Harry Frazee sold him to the Yankees to finance a  Broadway show, which saddled the Red Sox with 86 summers of lousy karma. Ohtani's karma, on the other hand, is soured by a much darker American instinct.

He's a foreigner, you see. And America's history is rife with antipathy toward foreigners, an un-erasable strain of xenophobia that at one time or another vented itself on Irishmen and Italians and Eastern Europeans and Latinos, and these days seems especially fond of Asians.

Maybe you missed what ESPN blowhole Stephen A. "Stop Me Before I Shout Again" Smith was hollering about the other day, but it's a sentiment that's as old as America itself. To wit, Smith was ranting that maybe it wasn't a good thing for a foreigner who uses an interpreter to be the face of America's Pastime.

"The fact that you have a foreign player who doesn't speak English, that needs an interpreter, believe or not ... I think contributes to harming the game to some degree when that's your box office appeal," Smith said. "It needs to be somebody like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout -- those guys. And unfortunately, at this moment in time, that's not the case."

That, boys and girls, is as xenophobic (not to say racist) as xenophobia gets. We seemed to be just one drawn breath from Smith invoking the Yellow Peril as an homage to other times in history when Asians were viewed with suspicion and disdain.

As it happens, the Blob's reading material right now has particular relevance:  Daniel James Brown's superb chronicle of the Japanese-American experience in World War II, "Facing The Mountain." It's all there: The fear, the loathing, the internment camps. The idea that, because one was non-white and happened to look like the enemy, one was not American at all, but something alien and corrupting.

And, eventually, the silent rebuke to all that represented by the sacrifices made by Nisei soldiers in the 442nd infantry, one of the most decorated units in the European theater.

Some screeching talking head lamenting that a Japanese man is the face of baseball these days hardly equates, of course. But strange times produce strange segues, and the segue here is not as strange as it seems. There is a common thread that runs from No Irish Need Apply to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the fear that stripped Japanese-Americans of their Constitutional guarantees to the rantings of a Stephen A. Smith.

It's all of a piece, or sort of, and it's all the same old weary nonsense. If Shohei Ohtani is bad for baseball, after all, it's certainly not evident; America can't get enough of him, which is why Kevin Cash is doing what he's doing. And Ohtani does, in fact, speak English. He uses an interpreter only because doing so makes what he says clearer and more in-depth for his American audience.

To his credit, Smith apologized on the air today. It takes little of the sting out of what he said, however; apologies of this nature are almost always the product of calculation and self-preservation. The spontaneity of his original sentiments -- and thus their authenticity -- therefore remain.

Some things never change, regrettably. History is particularly stubborn about that.