For nearly 24 hours the media ran with the narrative that a fan sitting behind home plate at Coors Field yelled the N-word at visiting Miami Marlins outfielder Lewis Brinson during an at-bat. The Colorado Rockies conducted an investigation after which it was determined the fan was yelling towards team mascot Dinger. A closer look on video reveals the fan not only yelling 'Dinger' but waving towards the mascot. The controversy still has not gone away with Brinson not completely buying the accurate Dinger theory, saying he cannot un-hear what he was convinced he heard. It is also debatable whether a Marlins player actually qualifies as a 'public figure'. In real time one listening to the television audio live could understand hearing the word that caused upwards to three million views on social media - far more than the local audience that regularly watches Marlins games in their home market. The fact is who is more likely to yell racial epitaphs? A fan (likely a season ticket holder) sitting behind home plate within point blank range of the batter or a drunken humanoid sitting in Row 20 of the outfield bleachers? At some point common sense must prevail. But like the Bubba Wallace noose fiasco in NASCAR more than a year ago Keith Olbermann and the media just quite let go. The slippery slope is going fast down a Colorado mountainside. There are now serious calls for the Rockies organization to rethink the mascot name used since the franchises inception in 1993. Be very careful saying or writing words in the daily lexicon such as bigger or trigger. And then of course there is the NBA's Denver Nuggets, which has five of the seven letters. Easy for it to automatically auto-correct as a former play-by-play announcer found out the hard way. The public and media remains so convinced that racism is out of control that they now go out of their way to create controversies.
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