Baseball

Keith Hernandez looking like sexist moron

Ex-star player, Mets broadcaster still thinks women should stay in kitchen

Stephen Chernin / AP

New York Mets broadcaster and ex-star Keith Hernandez said on the air that women 'don't belong in the dugout' after seeing Padres employee Kelly Calabrese in the dugout on Sunday.

Across New York City, old guard male chauvinists had to be cheering. They probably hadn’t heard stuff this good on television since Archie Bunker lived with Edith in Queens.

The sad thing is that, like Hernandez, they don’t realize that this is 2006, not 1986. Like Hernandez, they don’t understand that there are roles for women in sports beyond the ones played by the blondes who hang out in the player’s parking lot.

Men aren’t the only ones who want to be involved in sports anymore, just like women aren’t the only ones who dye their hair anymore. Since the Mets won the World Series 20 years ago, an entire new generation of women have grown up watching, playing and even running games.

Women are being paid to play basketball, and women are acting as role models for young soccer players. There are aspiring women umpires, a woman who is the assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even women in the broadcast booth.

The fact that there is a woman in the Padres dugout shouldn’t be a shocker. Thousands, perhaps millions, of young girls occupy dugouts while playing softball, and some even share them with boys while playing Little League baseball.

If Hernandez had opened his eyes he might have noticed some of them. Then maybe he wouldn’t have been caught so off guard when he saw a woman standing amid the soggy sunflower shells that litter every major league dugout.

Padres manager Bruce Bochy is in that dugout almost every day. Unlike Hernandez in the broadcast booth up above, he gets it.

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“I didn’t think gender was even an issue anymore,” Bochy said.

To her credit, Calabrese didn’t just shrug it off as a boys-will-be-boys moment. That would have been the easy way out, but this called for some outrage.

“It amazes me that somebody of that caliber that has obviously played the game before and is in front of an audience of millions of people would say something like that,” she said. “He not only discredited me as a person, but he discredited women.”

Hernandez said later he was sorry if he offended anyone, and the network that employs him, SportsNet New York, said he had been reprimanded.

It was a token slap on the wrist, but Hernandez is probably being punished enough. He’s the one, after all, who comes out of this looking like a sexist moron.

Hernandez may have a tough time hanging onto that “Just For Men” endorsement.

That’s because real men don’t act like that anymore.

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