ESPN’s dismissal of radio host Colin Cowherd Friday will no doubt earn the Worldwide Leader praise in some corners for taking a strong, principled stance against racism.

After all, Cowherd, who occupied the midday slot in ESPN Radio’s national talk lineup, made an indefensible statement Thursday on his show by insinuating that Dominican baseball players were unintelligent as part of a larger riff on whether a general manager could run a team without having been a field manager before.

“It’s baseball. You don’t think a general manager can manage? Like it’s impossible? The game is too complex? I’ve never bought into that, ‘Baseball’s just too complex.’ Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world-class academic abilities. A lot of those kids come from rough backgrounds and have not had opportunities academically that other kids from other countries have.

“Baseball is like any sport. It’s mostly instincts. A sports writer who covers baseball could go up to Tony La Russa and have a real baseball argument, and Tony would listen and it would seem reasonable. There’s not a single NFL writer in the country who could diagram a play for Bill Belichick. You know, we get caught up in this whole ‘thinking-man’s game.’ Is it in the same family? Most people could do it. It’s not being a concert pianist. It’s in the same family.”

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, then that Dominican players, like Toronto’s Jose Bautista took exception to Cowherd’s idiocy.

And when both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association called for Cowherd to apologize, well, something had to give.

So, ESPN management let Cowherd make an apology, of sorts, on his Friday show, watched and listened as the criticism mounted, then cut him loose late in the day.

It all sounds so nice and neat and perfect until you consider a few things. First, Cowherd has said similar things before about the late Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor and current Washington Wizards point guard John Wall, so his racist bonafides are well-established.

So, what made this particularly egregious to the Boys of Bristol? Well, start with the fact that the company announced this month that it will not extend Cowherd’s contract when it expires later this year. Indeed, the word in media circles is that Cowherd is taking his disgusting act to lucrative deals with Sirius/XM Radio and to Fox Sports. If you’re ESPN, why continue to take the heat for a guy who you have nothing more invested in?

More to the point, if MLB and the MLBPA sent word that players and officials might be cool if not frosty to ESPN until they did something about Cowherd, then there’s another practical reason to cut ties with him.

In the end, ESPN essentially kicked Colin Cowherd down the street for Fox and Sirius, each of whom has a financial relationship with MLB, to deal with. You can call what ESPN did practical, but don’t you dare call it principled.

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