Cade Cavalli Insists There Was Nothing Racist About Calling Willson Contreras “Boy”

Cade Cavalli, pitcher for the Washington Nationals, used “boy” Tuesday night in a taunt directed at Willson Contreras of the Boston Red Sox. Cavalli had caught Contreras looking at a third strike, and shouted, “Sit down, boy,” loud enough for it to be caught on the television broadcast. Contreras, a Venezuelan man six years Cavalli’s senior and with more than 40 times as many MLB games under his belt, took it exactly as intended. In the ensuing brouhaha, Contreras whipped off his batting helmet, fumbled it, recovered his own fumble, and then fired the helmet toward Cavalli. It was not Contreras’s best throw: The helmet bonked off of Andrés Chaparro, a bystander and Contreras’s countryman. Contreras was ejected.

Cavalli, who provoked Contreras, jawed with him, and beckoned him forward, did not physically engage, and was allowed to continue pitching. This part of it really bothered Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy, who took up his player’s case with the umpires and was ejected. “I felt like the comment made—’Sit down, boy,’ at the top of your lungs—was part of what caused that to happen,” Tracy explained after the game. “As I understood after that happened the people that they chose, that were gonna leave the game, I just felt like the other pitcher should’ve been one of them, too. That was my biggest complaint, there, was why is he still in the game?”

“I heard it from where I was sitting. An interesting choice of words: I don’t know how many he’d struck out at that point, and he chose that choice of words in that spot, right there. I don’t know, players nowadays yell and scream about stuff, but not having said a word, and then that happens, I just felt that was part of the equation, and I don’t know why he was still in the game.”

Tracy declined to describe Cavalli’s taunt as racist. Contreras also stayed clear of it. “To be honest, I don’t know,” said Contreras, who’d cooled down and was admirably diplomatic about the whole thing, when asked whether he interprets racism in Cavalli’s choice of words. “I’m Venezuelan, I don’t know if it’s racist or not. I’ll let MLB handle that.” Contreras also noted that he may not have much latitude for honesty in his answers: His ejection Tuesday was his second in two consecutive games, after he was tossed Monday for mock-challenging the umpire’s call on a check-swing strikeout. Contreras said a couple of times after the game that lately he feels like everything is against him; watching the guy who specifically provoked him stay in the game and post the best performance of his career would certainly exacerbate that feeling.

To hear Cavalli tell it, he felt like he and Contreras were already engaged in a specific thing. Back in the first inning, Contreras had bumped Cavalli while coming off the field, an act the latter interpreted as specifically hostile. “I’m walking off the field,” said Cavalli. “And he obviously sees me and just gets as close as he can, brushes me with his arm. It’s just a weird thing, and I was caught off-guard by it. I think we all know Willson, he’s an extremely competitive guy. He’ll do stuff to try to get under your skin.” The two disagree on whether Contreras apologized for the bump. In any case, according to Cavalli, the exclamation was a continuation of that confrontation, and nothing more.

Cavalli, of course, denied that there was any intent or really any thought whatsoever behind his choice of words: “I don’t know. I just lose my head in it. I’m competitive. I just told him to sit down.” Cavalli said that telling an opponent to sit down is “not a big deal,” conspicuously leaving out any mention of the word at the end of the taunt. Prodded further by reporters, Cavalli detoured. “I have extreme respect for him,” he said, of Contreras. “My heart goes out to Venezuela. I know what he’s going through. It breaks my heart what he’s going through.”

A word can be super gross even if it is not intended as a racist slur, but given the history of “boy” as a taunt, Cavalli’s use of it Tuesday was at the very least extremely fucking dumb and reckless. If you do not mean to leverage race against members of a racial minority, if you do not intend to cause that specific awful pain, if you prefer not to be thought of as racist, and if you do not want as a consequence of being thought of as racist to have hard plastic helmets thrown at your head, you have a responsibility to choose your words with maximum care.