Over the weekend, veteran sports writer Phil Mushnick of the New York Post filed a column criticizing Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez, a Dominican Republic native, for his use of an interpreter despite having played in the United States for over a decade. At the same time, Mushnick praised Sanchez’s teammate Gleyber Torres for conducting interviews in English despite Spanish being his first language.
“Gary Sanchez, after seven seasons with the Yankees and before that with the club’s farm teams, still can’t be bothered,” wrote Mushnick. “He still relies on an interpreter, still as deficient in English as he is in fundamental baseball skills and awareness.”
Mushnick was similarly critical of Sanchez in an article published last week, slamming YES announcers Michael Kay and David Cone for not being hard enough on the embattled 28-year-old.
Many took Musnick’s sharp criticism of Sanchez as unnecessary and a mean-spirited jab at a player coming off a career-worst season (.147 AVG in 2020 with 64 strikeouts in 156 at-bats). The comments were also perceived as racially insensitive, needlessly singling out Sanchez despite translators being present in virtually every big-league clubhouse. It was estimated last year that nearly a third of MLB players were of Latin heritage.
Mushnick isn’t the first journalist to put his foot in his mouth on this subject. In 2016, shortly after then-Marlins veteran Ichiro Suzuki collected his 3,000th major-league hit, ESPN anchor Todd Grisham issued an apology after chastising the Japanese-born outfielder for only giving interviews in his native tongue. Earlier this year, Mariners exec Kevin Mather was ousted from his role as club president days after footage was released of him mocking Hisashi Iwakuma and Julio Rodriguez for struggling to learn English.
No stranger to controversy, Mushnick has come under fire for similarly problematic remarks in past columns. One Twitter user pointed out Mushnick’s cringey use of “urban” to describe the Nets’ new aesthetic under part-owner (at the time) Jay-Z.
Lindsey Adler, who covers the Yankees for The Athletic, explained that Sanchez can speak English but prefers to give interviews in Spanish to avoid being misquoted, a fairly common sentiment among foreign-born players.
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