At around the same time Adam Jones was recently gaining baseball-wide notoriety by saying baseball was “a white man’s game,” the Toronto Blue Jays hired an executive and demonstrated once again that baseball is a white man’s game.

In naming Ben Cherington their vice president for baseball operation, the Blue Jays did what all of the other Major League Baseball teams do. They hire white guys as managers and front-office executives. Blacks, Latinos and women need not apply.

The last time I wrote about diversity hiring in baseball, a reader questioned my omission of Kim Ng as a general manager candidate, and he was right so I mention her upfront this time.

However, not that I doubt Ng’s credentials or her ability – she has been assistant general manager of the Yankees and Dodgers and currently is an executive in the commissioner’s office – but I am realistic and certain that no owner will hire a woman to be his team’s general manager. Owners can’t even put aside their prejudices to hire a black man or a Latino.

But this column stems more from the recent eruption of the controversy over protests by black players that were triggered by Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers and quickly inflamed by Jones, the center fielder of the Baltimore Orioles.

I have no problem with player protests as long as they are civil and peaceful. If players don’t want to stand for the National Anthem, that is their prerogative. I don’t even understand why the National Anthem is played before sports events. It is not played before Broadway shows or concerts or movies. It is an unnecessary holdover from the patriotic days of World War II.

The attacks of 9/11 intensified baseball’s need for patriotism. Already playing the National Anthem, teams were ordered to play “God Bless America.” That act made Kate Smith the comeback singer of the year.

But the self-proclaimed Mr. USA Patriot himself, George Steinbrenner, went further. Most teams shelved their Kate Smith recordings after a suitable period, bringing it out on holidays and maybe Sundays. The Yankees play it before every game, and the public address announcer asks fans to stand for it.

There is no reason to stand, and there is no Congressional act that requires it. When I have attended games, I have not stood for Kate’s biggest hit.

Baseball players are not rebels. Black baseball players especially are not rebels. There are too few of them to feel they could gain support from their fellow backs. Besides which, they make too much money to be rebels. Jean Val Jean didn’t make $4 million or more a year.

Baseball doesn’t need player protests. Baseball needs a commissioner who will do for minority candidates for the jobs of managers and general manager what he did for David Stearns. Commissioner Rob Manfred “pushed” the Brewers to hire Stearns last winter as general manager.

A baseball official provided that description to me, and I have written it often enough that Manfred has had ample opportunity to dispute it if he disagreed with the characterization, but neither he nor his aide have denied it.

The point is if Manfred could go to bat for Stearns, who worked in his office when he headed the labor division of the commissioner’s office, why can’t he use his big bat for minorities? Bud Selig used to say he couldn’t tell teams whom to hire, but Manfred has made a reasonable facsimile of that idea.

Manfred has talked a better job on minority hiring than he has performed. He has created a pipeline program through which members of minorities are supposed to be able to advance into major league front office positions. However, no role models seem to exist as inspiration for younger employees.

In Manfred’s 20 months as commissioner, clubs have hired or promoted 19 high-ranking executives. Eighteen of the 19 are white males. The lone minority is Al Avila, the Tigers’ general manager.

Has Manfred intervened in any hirings besides the Stearns appointment? I have no personal knowledge of anything, but I would guess not. He certainly hasn’t exerted his influence on behalf of a minority candidate. We know that because none has been hired.

When Manfred demonstrates he is serious about advancing the cause of minorities, I will believe him when he says he is serious. But he has offered no such demonstration.

I have cited the case of De Jon Watson, a black executive with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Among independents and office holders, Watson is considered the No. 1 candidate for a general manager vacancy. However, during Manfred’s tenure, clubs have named 15 general managers and presidents of baseball operations, and Watson wasn’t interviewed for any of the positions.

I suspect Watson has been bypassed because clubs didn’t want to have to explain why they didn’t hire him if they interviewed him.

Watson’s case, however, has become more complex, The Diamondbacks recently decided not to exercise the option in Watson’ s contract , meaning he would no longer be their senior vice president for baseball operations.

This by no means was a matter of merit. It was money and very likely a message to Tony La Russa, the chief baseball officer.

The Diamondbacks hired La Russa two years ago. He had been a highly successful manager but had no front-office experience. La Russa, in turn, hired Dave Stewart, his longtime pitcher and close friend, as general manager, and Watson.

The Diamondbacks enjoyed a 15 -win improvement in La Russa’s first year but have regressed this season and with a week to go were just about back where they were when a La Russa was hired.

This is only my speculation, but I don’t believe La Russa was responsible for Watson’s departure. La Russa spoke so highly of Watson that he wanted to call other clubs that were still seeking a general manager and recommend Watson.

Ultimately La Russa decided that step would have been inappropriate and kept Watson for his own. Now Watson will be moving on.

“I had communicated with De Jon last week about a new hire he was considering,” a Watson friend wrote to me in an email. At no time did he mention he was leaving the DBacks. Then the story broke 2 days later he was out. Very strange.”

As for minority hiring, Watson’s friend wrote, “I have nothing new on the minority side since they are not doing anything about it. Unbelievable how De Jon’s name has not been mentioned as a candidate in Minnesota. He is definitely qualified for that position as GM for the Twins.”

It was not my idea to be out of the country during the final weeks of one of the most bizarre and unlikely post-season races in recent years. It was the idea of my granddaughter, who in collaboration with her fiancé decided to get married this week.

I don’t blame Elital. She doesn’t know the difference between the Blue Jays and the Red Sox and even if she did she wouldn’t let them get in the way of her wedding. Yes, there are more important things in life than baseball. At the same time, though, she also wouldn’t let her personal happiness detract from the crazy things happening in Major League Baseball.

Some aspects of the races have remained stable. It’s very safe, for example, to say that the Cubs will win the National League Central title and finish with the best record in the majors. Their regular-season record, on the other hand, will have no effect on their fans’ goal, which is to deliver a World Series championship to Chicago’s North Side for the first time since 1908. The record, however, demonstrates how good the Cubs are, and they have been very good.

The Nationals are in good position to join the Cubs in the N.L. playoffs as East Division winners, but it is probably a bit premature to round out that field with the Dodgers as the West winners. The Giants dominated the division up to the All-Star break but have faltered badly since then. They could still stage a revival and overtake the Dodgers, but they haven’t played like they mean it.

The Giants have also jeopardized their backup route to the post-season, where they have prevailed in each of the previous three even-numbered years.

Even while they were tumbling behind the Dodgers in the division standings, the Giants held a comfortable wild-card lead, but suddenly that advantage has evaporated as well. Entering Sunday’s games the Giants had the league’s best second-place record but were a mere half a game ahead of the Mets and a game in front of the Cardinals.

Why or how the Mets are competing in the post-season race is a mystery. Starting the season with the best corps of starting pitchers in the majors, the Mets have stood helpless by watching them drop one by one, either to injury or ineffectiveness.

The Mets, along with the Nationals with Stephen Strasburg, have epitomized a team that doesn’t have a clue about dealing with the physical perils of young pitchers.

Teams like the Mets and the Nationals go out of their way to protect the arms of their young pitchers, but they get hurt anyway. Baseball today knows only one way of handling young pitchers, and that’s to pamper them. When the pitchers hurt their arm despite the pampering, their teams pamper them some more.

I grew up in an era where pitchers started every fourth day, not every fifth day as they do today, and sometimes they even finished what they started, that is, they pitched complete games and weren’t limited to 100 pitches and weren’t removed after seven innings with a perfect game, as Rich Hill of the Dodgers was Saturday when he had thrown 89 pitches.

Managers and their teams are obsessed with pitch limits and inning limits, and they still haven’t found a cure for the common cold or elbow injuries. That’s the thing that mystifies me. They keep imposing these limits to avoid injuries, but the pitchers continue to get hurt so they continue to impose limits.

Old-timers suggest two things they did in their time: throw more, not less, and run. Throwing, not pitching, every day would strengthen their arms, and running would strengthen their legs and take pressure off their arms.

No one wants to tell pitchers to run more for fear of offending them, and no one wants to tell pitchers to throw more for fear of getting them hurt. The result: pitchers keep getting hurt.

But I digress. I was talking about playoff races. If the Mets have surprised by getting into the National League race, the Yankees have shocked by doing that in the American League. The Yankees have not only pushed themselves into the wild-card competition, but they also have made their presence felt in the division race.

For weeks, if not months, the word on the Yankees was there were too many teams ahead of them that they would have to leapfrog to gain a post-season spot. At one time there were two teams in front of them in each division – a total of six teams they would have to climb over to secure a wild-card spot.

The Yankees even traded Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller, accumulating prospects for future use, thinking their contending season was over. But the Yankees, whether fueled by the awakened remaining veterans or the new kids, began winning and have continued winning while some of those wild-card competitors slipped.

At the start of play Sunday, the Blue Jays held the first wild card, and the Orioles the second a game behind the Blue Jays. Having leapfrogged the Royals, the Astros and the Mariners with a 7-game winning streak and 15 wins in 21 games, the Yankees were tied with the Tigers a game behind the Orioles.

With three weeks to go, two A. L. divisions seem to belong to the Indians and the Rangers. The A.L. wild cards, though, are in a contest that includes six or seven teams. That the Yankees are one of them makes no sense.

Those last three weeks won’t be as personally satisfying as my granddaughter’s wedding, but they will give me something to follow from afar.

The roster of names is as impressive as any team has had, more glittering than most: Rod Carew, Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett, Tony Oliva, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Zoilo Versalles, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat, Frank Viola, etc., etc., etc. The Minnesota Twins were as good as any team and better than most teams at discovering talent. They scouted these players, in some cases drafted them, and signed them. No analytics were involved.

“The people who worked hardest on that were George Brophy and his scouting staff,” Clark Griffith, a former Twins executive and son of long-time owner Calvin Griffith, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Then he related an incident that epitomized the way the Twins conducted their scouting business.

“Jim Rantz, who was Brophy’s assistant, in ’81 during the strike went to see his son play at Illinois,” Griffith recalled, “and he spotted a player named Kirby Puckett. That’s the way we ended up with Puckett.”

Besides Puckett, the Twins had enough talent to win division titles the first two years of division play (1969-70), then won the World Series in 1987 and ’91 and won an additional six division titles in nine years in the first decade of the new century.

The Twins, however, haven’t discovered any Kirby Pucketts in recent years. They haven’t won any division titles or World Series either. There is probably a correlation there. What the Twins have, though, is the worst record in the major leagues this season.

Their piteous poor play has cost long-time General Manager Terry Ryan his job and prompted Twins ownership to redo the structure of the organization. The Twins are interviewing candidates for a job that will resemble the roles of the top executives of a dozen teams, 10 of them known as president of baseball operations.

“We will not have that title,” said Dave St. Peter, the Twins’ club president. “I suppose if you look at the structure that is envisioned it would be comparable to the recent trend. You’ll have that executive position and then ultimately with that individual potentially hiring a general manager. It’s not necessarily set in stone that that will happen.

“Ultimately it will be up to whoever we bring in to that leadership role, and certainly their ability to help shape the structure as they see fit but also in collaboration with ownership and myself. We don’t go into this with any predisposed structure below the head baseball executive.

“I’m not focused on titles. The lead role will not be president of baseball operations, but the lead role also will not be general manager.”

The title president of baseball operations is relatively new, emerging in the last decade, though the responsibility is basically the same as general manager. The Baltimore Orioles, whose owner Peter Angelos hates the term general manager, hired Andy MacPhail as president of baseball operations in June 2007.

In October 2011 the Chicago Cubs used that title to lure Theo Epstein away from Boston, where he was general manager of the Red Sox.

Today 10 clubs have presidents of baseball operations, seven of whom also have general managers; Oakland has an executive vice president of baseball operations (Billy Beane) and Arizona has a chief baseball officer (Tony La Russa). Oakland and Arizona also have general managers, and both also have won-lost records that are among the worst in the majors.

Whomever they hire and whatever they call him, the Twins hope he will be more successful than the Athletics and the Diamondbacks.

“We have looked at a lot of other teams,” St. Peter said, “we’ve certainly spent a lot of time evaluating our own organization and believe that the role of somebody leading a baseball operation has evolved, changed and we believe that an executive position that allows somebody to be more at 30,000 feet potentially looking at all aspects of the baseball operations departments, whether it be major league, minor league, scouting, analytics, medical, sports science.

“All of the things that go into that role and structure that gives you the best chance of success. It requires somebody who can provide visionary leadership but also somebody who can insure that we’re providing on those strategies across multiple platforms. It’s our hope that we can provide the right person to do that.”

Having finished last season with an 83-79 record, the Twins had not been expected to be as bad as they have been. What happened, I asked Tom Kelly, who managed the Twins to their 1987 and 1991 World Series titles and is a special assistant to the general manager.

“Two, three, four, five major things happened,” he said. “I think we counted on guys coming back from injuries and hoping they would be ok. Hughes and Perkins to name two,” he said, referring to pitchers Phil Hughes and Glen Perkins.

Kelly also cited a failed experiment in the outfield with Miguel Sano. “We were hoping Sano would be OK in the outfield. That didn’t work. We wound up moving people around” and playing poor outfield defense generally.

Third baseman Trevor Pluoff missed a lot of time with injuries, Kelly added. “That created some inconsistencies in our infield play.”

Second baseman Brian Dozier “was awful offensively the first two months, he added. “Lately he’s been one of the better players in the league. We played the game not as well as we’re capable of playing. Advancing runners, doing the little things we need to do. Defensively we’re near the bottom. We’re way down there somewhere.”

Finally, Kelly said, the team’s starting pitchers haven’t been good enough to stop losing streaks, citing the recent 12-game losing streak that made a bad season worse.

“We didn’t play good enough,” he said. “Too many inconsistencies in pitching and defense. Too much wishing and hoping.”

And maybe too much for the new person to do to make an early impact.

What is likely is that the Twins will expand their use of analytics, which is the popular thing to do in Major League Baseball today. Noted for their scouting success, the Twins are not given credit for using analytics with all of the so-called advance statistics.

One man, however, defended the team’s use of statistics. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to be speaking about something that isn’t his area of expertise, he said the Twins use “plenty of analytics. They don’t talk about it very much. They get a bad rap for being behind and all that stuff. It’s a bunch of crap. The stereotype of the Twins just being old school scouting and development is not accurate. It’s the foundation but they certainly use statistics and analytics. It’s certainly a piece of the puzzle. It might not be as big as other places but it’s not the stereotype you hear from other places.”

Indeed, the Twins have a vice president of technology, John Avenson. He’s not an Ivy League graduate, as are many of the technology people in other front offices, but he is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in computer science.

Ask Tom Kelly his view of analytics, and he gives the idea that he’s glad he’s not managing in the analytics age.

“We have that department up there,” he said, “I’m probably too far removed to try to begin to understand it all. I do grasp some of it.”

Then he related an incident he recalled from his managing past.

“Many years ago,” he said, “I needed somebody to run in September. I asked can he read the ball, go first to third, second to home, all that stuff? ‘Well, he’s a six runner.’ I said I’m not too interested in a six runner. I’m interested in somebody who knows how to run and score a run. The next answer was ‘he’s a six runner.’

“Well, he stole second one night, stole third or got there on a passed ball. He got to third. Tie game in the ninth inning. The ball hits in the dirt and scooted way in front of the dugout of the opposing team. You know how far away that is, how it rolls on the Astroturf. Everybody jumped up in the air and we’re waiting for the fellow to come down and score and he went back to third. So there’s that six runner.”

“I still think there’s a big part of the eye test that you have to pass,” Kelly said. Eye test? That’s how scouts refer to evaluating players the way they do. They actually see a player on the field, not on a computer.