Tony Bruno, in the heat of the brawl between the Phillies and the Giants, said a very bad thing on Twitter.
He called Ramon Ramirez an "alien," and there's no two ways around whether or not the comment was racist.
It just was. And that's why Bruno quickly deleted his tweet.
What's missing is a reasonable explanation as to why Bruno logged onto Facebook and penned a non-sensical rant about "not hiding" from his comments, when he somehow manages to avoid actually saying he's sorry for his racist reference to Ramirez.
The biggest nugget in the goldmine of irony that Bruno put up? His attempt to pin the blame for being "vile" on other people who were, you know, offended with his comments.
"Many have whipped themselves into a frenzy of hate with vile, profane and even threats of violence in their 'copy and paste' world of instant justice," Bruno wrote. "I will spare you the embarrassment of re-posting these truly ugly messages."
I mean, wow. Just wow -- he's "sparing" us the "embarrassment" of "truly ugly messages?" A man who embarrassed himself with a truly ugly message is now sparing the public?
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Come on, Tony. It's one thing to go on the offensive and apologize profusely (Bruno notes he's done that).
It's an entirely different thing to try and pin the blame for something he said and wrote on "the sheep on facebook, twitter and blogs."
The only credit Bruno might deserve is for coming up with a new excuse for saying something stupid on Twitter -- he's actually using his refusal to be hacked as his excuse.
But the bigger problem is that his unhinged rant on the "unwritten rules of baseball" draws most of the attention. And how such rules -- including throwing at other players -- could harm the kids. (No, really, he does this.)
In doing so, he's committing the worst crime of all, because he's avoiding a discussion of the real crime here: a comment about another person's race that deserves to be actually fleshed out rather than stuffed back in a box and avoided.
