Getting some jobs requires a more elite level of talent than others. For example, it appears that a post as an op-ed contributor to USA Today these days demands a talent for awfulness that would far exceed the grasp of most Americans. Witness left-wing columnist Mike Freeman, whose job description is “Race and Inequality Editor-Sports.” His column entitled “Ron DeSantis pushes racist tropes in latest comments about basketball and baseball players” must be read to be believed. For a symptom of how much partisan dreck this column is, Freeman asserts that “DeSantis is one of the most prominent anti-Black politicians alive,” citing with a straight face the ridiculous NAACP “travel advisory” against Florida and linking to an article quoting notorious bigot Al Sharpton.

So, what are the comments that Freeman describes as “not a dog whistle actually, a bullhorn … wait, not a bullhorn, stadium speakers”? Here’s the whole thing:

DeSantis did an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network and one of the topics was baseball. The interviewer called it a “thinking man’s game” (another dog whistle/bullhorn/stadium speaker) then asked the Florida governor and presidential hopeful his thoughts on the sport. “So I think that there’s kind of a place for everybody on a baseball team if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to practice, and if you’re willing to hone your skills,” DeSantis said. “I kind of thought it was always a very democratic game, a very meritocratic game. “Whereas I kind of viewed like basketball as like these guys are just freaks of nature. They’re just incredible athletes. In baseball, you know, you have some guys that might not necessarily be the best athletes, but maybe they’ve got you know that slider that nobody can hit, or they have the skills that allow them to compete at the highest level.”

That’s right: It’s now racist to notice that basketball platers are really tall.

Now, of course, DeSantis was a serious baseball player — he played in the Little League World Series and was captain of the Yale baseball team — so we can forgive him for being something of a partisan of the national pastime over all other sports, especially when he’s talking up his own biography. But the point he’s making is thunderingly obvious to anyone who has watched both sports. Yes, you need to have natural athletic talent to play any sport, and you need a lot of it to play at an elite level such as major college or professional sports. Yes, most people who get ahead in any sport also need to work really hard at it. And yes, there’s a mental aspect of any sport that rewards people who put in a lot of study or have a native capacity for the kinds of strategic thinking (in advance and on the fly) involved in the sport.

But it’s just inarguably the case that basketball is more athletically demanding, and open to a far smaller number of people as a career, than baseball (or many other sports). There is one body type — very tall and lanky — that dominates basketball, supplemented by the occasional Shaq or Barkley type who is naturally very tall and wide but also quick and nimble. Everybody needs to be quick, and everybody needs to have some combination of speed and leaping ability. And nobody else can do it.

The average player in the NBA is something like 6’7″. The number of players of any note in the league who are under six feet tall at any given time is rarely more than a couple of guys, and those usually have even more pronounced athletic gifts of speed and leaping ability. The NBA is extremely non-diverse even compared to the NFL just in terms of what kinds of body shapes and talents it rewards: there are few pro basketball players built like an offensive lineman or a kicker. Not for nothing is the phrase “freak of nature” an entirely common one for elite basketball players, because it’s the very unusual human who can be 6’10” and still be coordinated and fleet-footed.

When a bunch of baseball players walk by you, even in street clothes, you can tell that they are, as a group, big, athletic guys. But when a bunch of basketball players walk by you, you can tell that’s a bunch of basketball players. It’s not the skin color, it’s the height and the build. I was recently at my 30th college reunion. The baseball players look pretty much like everybody else. Some of the football players are slimmer now and no longer visibly recognizable as guys who played football. But picking out the guys from the hoops team in a room is no harder than it was 30 years ago.

There are a much broader variety of body types and unconventional athletes in baseball, and always have been. The game has room for players like Aaron Judge or Dave Winfield or Darryl Strawberry who have a natural NBA build, but it also has short guys like Jose Altuve and Freddie Patek, and fat guys like John Kruk and Cecil and Prince Fielder and Mickey Lolich, and tall but very skinny guys like Randy Johnson. It makes stars of oddly-shaped men like Yogi Berra, who had freakish hand-eye coordination and durability, but was squarely built and (like many baseball players) slow afoot, and had to learn catching by endless hard work. You can get to be a star by learning a really strange skill like a knuckleball, or you can have a long career as a backup catcher by mastering defense and the handling of pitchers. The game doesn’t demand the insane levels of conditioning of basketball and soccer, in which the players are constantly running for hours. Even at the college level, it’s much easier to get into baseball on the basis of an immense amount of work and middling talent than it is in basketball.

Freeman continues:

DeSantis was essentially talking about two leagues, and how the mostly Black one, the NBA, is full of freaky athletes with fast-twitch muscles and apparently not as democratic or meritocratic or whatever-cratic as baseball players. Then, according to DeSantis, there’s baseball, or the MLB, the mostly white sport, full of OK athletes but gosh darn, do they work hard, and form democracies and meritocratic-ocracies-republics. They’re not freaks at all. They’re real Americans.

It’s an odd time for Freeman to make this argument immediately after the NBA title was claimed by a team led by a 6’11” Serbian two-time MVP. Freeman might also consult a mirror if he’s going to play this game. When pressed to argue that baseball requires great athletic talent, too, he writes, “baseball history is full of remarkable athletes from Willie Mays to Roberto Clemente to Shohei Ohtani.” He couldn’t think of a single white player with athletic talent? Not Mike Trout, or Mickey Mantle, or Nolan Ryan? And the idea that baseball is a more small-d democratic sport is also supported by the simple fact that a baseball roster is twice the size of a basketball roster, and that no one star can carry a team the way a dominant basketball star does. For that matter, it was baseball’s image as the democratic, meritocratic game that was used by proponents of racially integrating Major League Baseball before black players broke the color line in football or basketball.

More broadly, Freeman is bad at both demographics and history. A steady 28 percent of major league ballplayers are foreign-born. The ranks of the game’s stars have been studded with Dominican-born players in particular for the past two decades. The image of baseball as a thinking man’s game also long predates modern racial demographic divides among the sports.

If you go back to the 1890s and early 1900s, at a time when baseball was played disproportionately by the hard-drinking sons of poor Irish immigrants, there was lots of discussion of “scientific baseball.” John McGraw, the archetype of that generation of ballplayers, wrote a book entitled “Scientific Baseball” in 1913. He didn’t coin the term; “Scientific Base Ball Pitching. A Treatise on the Pitcher, Pitching, Origin and Philosophy of the Curve, Methods of Pitching and Practice” was published in 1894. In 1911, the New York Times published a lengthy piece headlined “Scientific Baseball has Changed the Old Game; Quick Thinking, Clever Guessing, Faultless Team Work and Intelligent Signaling Necessary for a Pennant Winner To-day — Teams Made Up of Specialists.” This was an era when there was no pro basketball or football, and when African-Americans had yet to assume a visible place in either sport’s amateur ranks. They weren’t comparing baseball to another sport.

Basketball never had a comparable image, even when it was an all-white sport – even when, in the 1920s, it was briefly considered a Jewish-dominated game. There was no shortage of really vicious anti-Semitic stuff written about basketball in that era, but it still sounded nothing like the “Scientific baseball” literature or the odes to baseball’s contemplative pace. Black stars didn’t really start taking over basketball until the early 1960s, and the game only acquired its reputation as a predominantly black sport after the 1967 founding of the American Basketball Association.

I realize that it’s hard to come up with regular content sufficient to justify a job as “Race and Inequality Editor-Sports.” Even by that standard, Freeman is stretching: This was his second column this month straining for a sports angle to attack DeSantis. The prior column was literally just cheering an NBA player criticizing DeSantis, as if a celebrity slagging a Republican politician was some sort of unusual event. USA Today should have more respect for its readers’ intelligence.