I wasn’t trying to imply that Soria or anyone else in particular is racist. My point is that Soria is a white suburban kid whose dad is a dentist from a town where they have paved streets, running water, shopping malls, movie theaters, high schools, and Little League teams that have uniforms and proper diamonds and all that. Just like most of us posters here on this site.

He doesn’t have very much in common with a black Dominican kid who comes from a town where they live in shacks and play ball with a stick and a rock and have a per capita income of like four thousand bucks a year, if that.

They speak very different versions of Spanish. The Mexican standard dialect is pretty close to the “international standard,” if one exists, while Dominican poor people speak a dialect that I can’t understand very well. Culturally, everything’s different. They don’t eat the same food, listen to the same music, have the same social customs. Northern Mexico is very Americanized, as well, which the DR isn’t. Everybody there who has been to school speaks at least some English.

Comparing Soria to most Dominican players is sort of like comparing the son of a dentist from Overland Park to some hillbilly from Assboink, Arkansas. That doesn’t mean people from the DR or Assboink are inferior or anything, just that they ain’t the same kind of people.

I very much doubt that Hillman knew any of this. My guess is that he automatically mentally categorizes Soria along with the American players, since he’s much more like them than he is like the other Latinos, and hung “Jack” on him as a nickname, just like we had Dougie and Grudz and Sabes and Monty and other shortened versions of long names or names difficult to pronounce.