You know by now how Miami Heat forward Meyers Leonard dropped an anti-Semitic slur while playing video games online, and apologized by saying he didn’t know what the word meant.
Cody Decker, friend of Carton & Roberts and retired MLB player, isn’t buying it.
“My last name is Decker, I have to tell people I’m Jewish for them to know,” Decker said. “Opening up with that is quite the move – are you kidding me? You went HARD K and didn’t know what it meant? It was adamant that he got it in, it was real clear.”
Decker has heard that word a lot in his career, but as he mentioned, the anti-Semitism he dealt with in baseball was much more high-level.
“The K word was not dropped very often – I’ve heard it more than normal people do – but it was not thrown around lovingly in the clubhouse,” he said. “If it was, I’d have had a serious talk with somebody – and by serious talk, I mean I’d have thrown them into their locker and beat the hell out of them. A lot of jokes are made in the clubhouse, and if you know a guy and you’re close, ribs go back and forth, but once you get to the point where you’re casually throwing around slurs, we have a problem.”
Decker told Carton & Roberts a story about one night while he was playing for the Rangers’ Double-A team in Frisco, Texas, that almost drove him over the edge.
“They wrote an article about Nate Freiman and I that called us “the best power-hitting Jewish combo in baseball history,” which is a long list of Nate and me,” Decker said. “A couple fans got a hold of it and rode us hard, dropping that hard K and every other Jewish slur all night. I was trying to play a baseball game, and it was like I walked into the opening scene of American History X. I was so pissed, I almost jumped into the crowd.”
That clubhouse banter, or an aggressive chaplain (another story Decker told), is one thing, but then Decker told another anecdote about how, when he played for Team Israel in the 2021 World Baseball Classic qualifiers, the team legitimately had bodyguards to protect them.
“I’m not sitting here saying my experience is any worse than anyone else’s, but when I played for Team Israel, we had a decoy bus that had to be sniffed by bomb-sniffing dogs, and we couldn’t tell people we played for Team Israel or wear gear because we were afraid people might do something,” he said. “This was in Jupiter, Florida, in 2012, and we were legitimately worried about a terroristic threat. I know we had two members of our team who were hidden bodyguards.”
Decker now says that the experience gives him “a very unique history with my Jewish heritage,” but the pain is still real. Things got slightly better in 2016, when Israel qualified for the WBC, but as Decker said, the second go-round and the threat of “American Nazis” saw the team “take a step 50 years backwards.”
“It was staggering to me, but as we went on, the narrative of our team changed,” he said. “The first week in Korea, we were has-beens and nobodies who didn’t belong there. It was like, ‘who are these minor-leaguers trying to play here?’ Then when Week 2 came around, we were the USA B-Team, a bunch of Jewish kids from Los Angeles.”
Listen to Decker's entire appearance on Carton & Roberts below.
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