It is funny to hear Alou beat his chest about how bad it is in the US; if it is bad in the US, it is not because of these radio men, and I bet Alou's home, healthcare, and wealth are far ahead in his USA lifestyle than they ever would be in his native DR....I would respect ALou more is he would have just ignored the radio men-one way or the other, what people of no import say on the radio nowadays should not bring about the wrath we have seen-ignore them and move on! Alou's response made this more of a story than it had to be ( I have yet to hear him criticize Barry for any reason whatsoever, I wonder why ).

(1) Re Alou's Cream of Wheat brain, he didn't say it as disparagingly as you would think. He said that all of the management's lousy player moves have made it so difficult for Alou to manage that his brain has turned to Cream of Wheat trying to do it. He separately complimented his management skills. Not such a bad thing at all.

(2) Re brain-dead Carribeans, he wasn't referring to all Carribeans this way. He was referring to the Carribeans in the Giants' line-up and their practice of swinging at bad pitches. He wasn't saying they were brain-dead in general or brain-dead because they were Carribean. Just brain-dead for swinging at bad pitches. Stupid choice of words, though--he should have just said their names rather than grouping them together as "Carribeans". I doubt he realized that it would sound the way that it did, probably because he doesn't think in a racist way about Carribeans and just thought of "Carribean" as a descriptive label, a shortcut for referring to several players. (Like someone else said, he later criticized management for not trying to bring other, better Carribean players onto the team, so he's obviously not anti-Dominican). But other people with more knowledge of the history of discrimination probably legitimately felt stung by it. Just another reason that we should all stop labeling people by their national or racial origins.

Too bad for Larry Krueger and his family that he was in such a sensitive market and that the ownership of his station is mixed up with the ownership of the Giants. There should have been some way to solve this without putting what seems like a decent, talented guy out of a job. You never heard anything other than that he wanted to apologize. We should use incidents like this to teach rather than to condemn. I'm sure he would have learned his lesson without the ultimate punishment. It's SF's loss.

PS: DW is wrong about the giants being KNBRs bread and butter. The station only owns 1.5 percent of the team. The Giants need KNBR more than KNBR needs the team. KNBR broadcasts every major league team in the bay area except the A's. If the Giants and KNBR parted ways I would expect to hear the A's as soon as they could plug them in. KNBR is in a unique position of being a radio superstation. At night the signal can be picked up in Montana. They are not too worried what the Giants think about Larry Krueger. KNBR sells air, the higher profile the on air talent is, the more money they get. The Filipe Alou show was a top earner for ad revinue. Larry Krueger did not generate as much money as the ball players do so he is expendible. If it was the other way around, KNBR would promote Larry as the the posterchild for free speach rights.

But if we're talking about hyperbole, what about Krueger being "the messenger of Satan"? After Krueger and two others were fired, Alou said this, "God does not allow anyone to make fun of his children or laugh at his children. God won't tolerate that. It's ridiculous that all of this was brought about by those guys. I didn't start this. He [Krueger, aka, "Messenger of Satan"] did. Anybody who wants to repent after making a statement like that has to understand that payback is going to come sooner or later."

So I guess God is speaking through Felipe Alou about payback. Those of you who climbed on the Felipe Alou bandwagon may want to listen to the tune he's playing.

A: They were all juiced up when they hit more than Maris did. And the reason that's relevant is now Barry can't play because of testing or withdrawal or whatever and the Giants suck and all of the sudden Felipe's an idiot. The Giants got by for a few years with a lot of retreads and role players because they had Barry and Jeff Kent in the middle of the order and decent pitching. Maybe dusty was a better manager than Alou but when you lose you tend to have a lot of other problems that winning takes care of. Like this one.

A more interesting question is why professional sports teams of all sorts keep hiring obvious incompetents and losers to run their clubs? The Niners just got rid of one - and, of course, they shipped the best coach in football to Denver because Bill Walsh couldn't stand the competition.

Outside The Beltway : Radio Host Larry Krueger Fired for "Racist" CommentsLast week, Krueger ranted about the Giants' struggles during...

An interesting argument, although the "criticizing the team" angle is not what's been emphasized in any of the reporting I've seen and does not appear the basis of Alou's resignation from his KNBR job.

I'm only tangentially familiar with the Stone case. It's not as if KNBR is the equivalent of WGN to the Cubs or WTBS to the Braves, though. While they have a tiny ownership interest, they aren't the main ownership.

And frankly generating controversy is often an excellent way to get viewers to tune in. It's not as if the Giants' sterling play is a reason. Minus Barry Bonds' shots into McCovey Cove, they're rather boring now that they're out of the hunt.