Cade Cavalli says he’s sorry for ‘sit down, boy’ epithet: Whatever

Whether you want to buy the apology from Cade Cavalli for his use of the racial epithet “boy” to punctuate a strikeout of Willson Contreras or not, it is what it is – Cavalli is sincere, or he isn’t; he either didn’t know the racist connotations of the word when he screamed it out loud at a player of color, or he did.

I’ve not come across any exposes of Cavalli – a righthander who struck out 13 in seven innings in an 8-1 win over the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday, around the “sit down, boy” incident that emptied both benches, and led to the ejections of Contreras and two others – revealing that the Washington Nationals pitcher, by way of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has a history of racist comments online, or that he pulled a John Rocker (remember him?) to a sportswriter.

Which, that’s good, I guess.

I don’t fault anybody for saying, Well, he’s from Oklahoma, he’s a White guy, he’s probably MAGA, must be a racist, because that’s what people are going to do these days.

Nor do I fault the defenders who point to Contreras being a guy known for blowing his stack, who had been thrown out of the game a day before for mocking the home-plate umpire – who earlier in the game on Tuesday had broken an unwritten rule of baseball in brushing by Cavalli as the two walked off the field after an inning-ending pop-up.

I am surprised that we haven’t yet had somebody like Megyn Kelly come out with a throaty defense of Cavalli, making him out to be the victim here.

That one feels like the next step with this story.

I can buy Cavalli, next time he faced Contreras, being a bit juiced up after that earlier drive-by, and that he’d get pumped after getting the K.

Contreras is hitting .283 with a .906 OPS and 18 homers this season; striking out Willson Contreras is not striking out Mario Mendoza (remember him?).

That’d be another good reason to be jazzed up about getting Contreras out.

I don’t particularly care that Cavalli is now trying to say that he was “extremely torn up about the way things were perceived,” because that whole act there feels like a guy trying to aw, shucks his way out of a pickle.

I think we can all concede that we all know that the term “boy” carries with it racial connotations when directed at a person of color, and that the ease with which the term came out of Cavalli’s mouth suggests that this wasn’t the first time he’s ever said “boy” out loud in reference to a person of color – even if it may well have been the first time he did so with a crowd mic picking up and broadcasting it live across the country and across the world.

OK, so, anyway, he says he’s sorry, and whether he is or is just saying he is, that doesn’t really matter.

Maybe this can be a learning lesson for all involved – for Cavalli, for the MLB.TV broadcasters who work Nats games who embarrassed themselves by not addressing, even once, the controversy brewing online as the game was still live.

For Megyn Kelly, after she does what we know she’s jonesing to do – making a White pitcher calling a POC hitter “boy” into a free speech issue.

At the end of the day, it’s not so much that Cade Cavalli let slip a racial epithet; it’s that the racial epithet is there on the tip of his tongue, in position to escape in the heat of a moment, in the first place.