It’s easy to dismiss Ozzie Guillen’s recent rant about the way Latino players are treated in Major League Baseball compared with the way Japanese players are treated. It’s easy to dismiss anything Guillen says because the Chicago White Sox manager says so much, and so much of it is inflammatory, certainly controversial.

I enjoy hearing and reading Guillen’s comments. I have enjoyed his remarks since I came to know him as the White Sox shortstop in the mid-1980s. It wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time in the White Sox clubhouse. When he saw reporters present, he often went into his act, which usually meant making sarcastic comments about his teammates.

Guillen has a different platform now. He’s a major league manager who has a ready-made soapbox from which to express his views.

Most recently, last weekend, he talked about what he said were differences in the way Major League Baseball deals with Japanese players and Hispanic players. Each Japanese player, he noted, is assigned a translator. Hispanic players are not afforded that perquisite.

More important, however, was Guillen’s comments about Hispanic players and performance-enhancing drugs. Baseball, he said, doesn’t do a good job educating young Latino players about the dangers of those drugs.

“I’m the only one to teach the Latinos about not to use,” Guillen said.

Although the White Sox issued a statement distancing themselves from their manager’s remarks, Major League Baseball did not respond to Guillen. However, a baseball official said that Commissioner Bud Selig was not happy with Guillen’s comments and that his aides were looking into them. That probably means Guillen will be fined. Baseball, like all sports, doesn’t believe in freedom of speech.

But Guillen knows whereof he speaks. Selig and M.L.B. might be proud of the job they are doing with illegal performance drugs, but developments are showing poor results with their efforts with Latinos.

The commissioner’s office issues a news release each time it suspends a player for violating the drug program, and this was the latest, issued Wednesday:

“The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball announced today that two Minor League players have received 50-game suspensions after each tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance in violation of the Minor League Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.

Minor League pitchers Mariano Chevalier of the Chicago White Sox organization and Richard Rodriguez of the Houston Astros organization both tested positive for metabolites of Stanozolol. The suspension of Chevalier is effective immediately, while the suspension of Rodriguez will be effective upon his reinstatement from the Disqualified List. Both players are members of their organization’s Dominican Summer League team.”

The sentence to note is the last, which identifies the players as Dominicans. Latin players dominate the list of suspended minor leaguers. This year’s roll call of suspended players has 68 names, one major league player, Edinson Volquez of Cincinnati, and 67 minor leaguers. Volquez is Dominican, and 49 of the 67 minor league players are Latino – 32 Dominican natives, 14 Venezuelans, 1 Puerto Rican, 1 Mexican and 1 Cuban. This year’s ratio is no different from other years.

M.L.B. says it has a good drug-education program, but if three-quarters of the players who test positive for drug use are Hispanic, baseball is failing them, which means its education program gets a failing grade.

Those results also bolster Guillen’s claim and should undermine any disciplinary action Selig might consider taking against Ozzie.

Instead of disciplining or even chastising Guillen for his public position, the commissioner should commend Guillen for doing more than his part in educating young Latin players. Selig might even meet with Guillen and ask him for ideas on improving baseball’s education program.

Educating Latin players about the dangers of performance-enhancers – if nothing else, they can get you suspended for 50 games – may be more difficult than educating American minor leaguers. The difference in cultures is one reason. Performance-enhancing drugs are not illegal in all Latin countries as they are in the United States.

Let’s not forget Guillen’s other point about preferential treatment for Japanese players. What major league teams do constitutes a double standard, but it’s more easily understood and explained than the disparity in drug suspensions.

When a Japanese player joins a major league team, he usually is that team’s only Japanese player. It has no other Japanese players, and it has no Japanese coaches or front-office personnel. If the team doesn’t hire a translator – and they are translators, not interpreters, as they are always called, because they are translating words and sentences, not interpreting them – it has no way of effectively communicating with the player.

Teams, on the other hand, have multiple members who are Hispanic, players, coaches, maybe even front-office officials. They don’t need to add translation specialists.

But it’s one thing for a manager to ask a Spanish-speaking coach or player to translate for him with a Latin player who doesn’t know English. It’s another to ask a coach or a player to do a pre-game or post-game interview with the news media. That’s not his job, and he shouldn’t have to serve in that role.

Not all Latin players have the desire and the ambition to learn English. For their own benefit, they should learn it; even Guillen says they should. But that doesn’t excuse teams from having Spanish translators.

I have often thought about my own language limitations. Had I known when I was in school what I was going to do for the next 50 years, I would have taken all of the years of Spanish that were available. Somehow Latin didn’t help much when I interviewed Latin players.