‘Yu Dog’ highlights a night of cultural insensitivity for Yu Darvish’s debut

After a rough start in which he gave up five runs in the first two innings against the Mariners, Yu Darvish settled down nicely in his Rangers debut on Monday night. Texas rallied back and got Darvish the win after he managed to go 5 2/3 innings, allowing no runs after the second inning. As most of you probably expected, the evening was also highlighted by a solid amount of cultural insensitivity.

For starters, there is the sign you see in the photo above. The phrase “We love Yu long time” has also found its way onto t-shirts and other merchandise, none of which to our knowledge is sold by the Rangers themselves.

The team did, however, contribute to the ignorance with their featured food item of the evening. Twitter began buzzing last night about the Rangers selling a “Yu Dog,” and as it turns out it’s real. As Darren Rovell tweeted and Big League Stew confirmed having seen on the Fox Sports Southwest broadcast, the “Yu Dog” is a deep-fried, wonton-wrapped hot dog with teriyaki beef and seaweed salad. It was reportedly being served at the Captain Morgan Club in center field with chop sticks, a fortune cookie, and french fries fried in sesame oil on the side. Word of Mouth shirts shared a photo of it with us on Twitter:

Apparently the Rangers learned nothing from the mistake Ben & Jerry’s made or that fan sign the Knicks decided to show on their video board during the peak of the Linsanity mayhem. I know the idea is to make money, but when will people realize they need to stop going down the stereotypical food item road?

To top it all off, there was even an innocent slip of the tongue from Rangers analyst Tom Grieve on Fox Sports Southwest. While it was more than likely unintentional, Big League Stew transcribed an unfortunate choice of words that Grieve came up with during the game when describing the Mariners’ hits off Darvish in the first inning.

“They’ve hit a couple of balls hard,” Grieve said. “Smoak hit his line drive hard, Seager hit his ball pretty good and then there’s been a couple of chinkers. Ichiro’s little blooper and this slider, Olivo just hits right off the end of the bat and just dumps it over Kinsler’s head.”

It could be just me, but in roughly 15 years of being a hardcore baseball fan I’ve never once heard a weak hit described as a “chinker.” I’m not saying Grieve was being intentionally racist by any means, but a certain ESPN writer can tell you how much a poor choice of words can hurt.

LBS is awaiting comment from the Rangers reagrding the “Yu Dog.”

Photo credit: Matthew Emmons-US PRESSWIRE