Things Got Super Racially Insensitive When Pedro Martinez Saluted The Indians On Live TV

Pedro Martinez has been great on television for TBS during the 2016 MLB Playoffs but this was really, really bad. After the Indians bounced the Boston Red Sox from the postseason, Martinez decided that he wanted to pay tribute to Cleveland’s baseball team. He didn’t do this by saying “hey, fellas, good job” or anything like that, though.

Instead he said on live television that he used to “hunt Indians” and then paid tribute to them by doing a stereotypical battle cry. Once that ended, he did the whole “who is my daddy” thing that Martinez has kind of become famous for, and while that would have been fine, the 10ish seconds proceeding it were really gross.

Martinez has always been one of the more eccentric people in baseball from the time that he was in the league as a player, so odds are this wasn’t meant to be malicious in any way, shape, or form. But still, this is rather racially insensitive, and despite how silly Martinez is, you’d like to think that he knew that this was out of bounds. Hopefully we don’t see it again during this postseason (or really just in general, this is a pretty bad look for Pedro and for TBS).

UPDATE: Martinez took to Twitter to discuss this moment, saying he was “misunderstood” and that he was trying to honor Cleveland.

“Sorry you didn’t understand” is a pretty lame way to apologize, but at least he tried to say he was sorry, which is nice.

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