Last year, the New York Mets, a team whose most valuable asset was a Dominican shortstop too young to buy beer, didn’t have one Latino on their seven-man coaching staff. Everyone was mystified when Jose Reyes couldn’t get on the same page with the team in matters of personal training and pitch selection.

This spring, Boston’s David Ortiz spoke out about the fact that neither management nor the players’ union had provided players with Spanish-language materials on baseball’s new drugs policy. One might draw a connection between this lack of communication and the disproportionate number of Hispanic players who have tested positive for banned substances this year.

Last month, Larry Krueger, a radio show host working for the San Francisco Giants’ flagship station blamed the team’s problems on “a bunch of brain dead Caribbeans hacking at slop.” (These Caribbeans presumably included infielders Omar Vizquel and Edgardo Alfonzo, both of whom are notably intelligent players and neither of whom is Caribbean, being Venezuelan.)

Krueger was suspended for a week for his comments, and only fired after a widespread outcry ensued. Commissioner Bud Selig – who found time earlier this summer to make a great show of circumventing baseball’s collectively bargained disciplinary protocols to personally suspend villainous Texas pitcher Kenny Rogers – made no public comment on the matter.

I could go on, but the point is pretty plain. Baseball has a problem with its history and treatment of Hispanic players. It isn’t as bad as it was in the 1930s, when Latinos could play in the majors only if their skin was light enough, nor is it as bad as it was in the 1960s, when they were stereotyped as needlessly flashy when not possessed of fiery tempers. Nevertheless, about a quarter of the players in today’s MLB aren’t treated, in some important ways, as the equals of their peers. This is to say nothing of the scarcity of Latinos in the most important positions in baseball front offices or the sometimes scandalous treatment of teenage prospects in the Dominican Republic, among other issues.

So it’s difficult to know what to make of Major League Baseball’s announcement of a new program, run in partnership with Chevrolet (“the official vehicle of Major League Baseball”), called “Chevrolet presents the Major League Baseball Latino Legends Team.” The project consists of providing fans with a ballot from which they can elect an all-time Hispanic team; the results will be announced before Game 4 of the World Series.

“Through this program, and thanks to our valued partner Chevrolet,” said Commissioner Selig in a press release, “we have a tremendous opportunity to reflect on the immense contribution that Latino players have made to the game of baseball.”

This, at least, is true, and any provocation to reflect on that legacy is always a welcome one, though one suspects the Major League Baseball Latino Legends Team has mostly to do with a statistic cited a bit further down in the press release, namely that 12.4% of baseball fans – around six and a half million people – are Hispanic.

It’s pretty unclear, though, exactly how the ballot is supposed to encourage any real appreciation of history. It’s slapdash, sloppy, and internally inconsistent. For instance, you can apparently only vote for players who played in the majors, which means that legendary players like Cristobal Torriente, whose skin was too dark for the major leagues of his time, are right out the window. . . except that Martin Dihigo, who made his name in the Negro Leagues and never pitched a game in the majors, is on the ballot. Odd.

Similarly odd are the seemingly arbitrary criteria for eligibility, which are explained nowhere on the ballot and really make no sense. Vizquel isn’t on the ballot, but Alex Rodriguez, born in New York, is. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” one might object. “Baseball is recognizing the rich contributions of Latino Americans, who are every bit as Latin as those born abroad.” That makes sense – why, then, isn’t Ted Williams on the ballot? His mother was Mexican. Examples of similar omissions could fill this page.

Perhaps most odd of all is that the ballot, or at least the version of it presented on MLB’s Web site, offers no biographical or statistical information on these players. I don’t expect anyone to vote for Dihigo over Pedro Martinez, but it might be nice to let people know that rather than being just a name on a list, Dihigo was quite possibly the greatest two-way threat in baseball history, a genuine nine-position player who is enshrined in the American, Mexican, and Cuban halls of fame.

It’s obvious that this project wasn’t fully thought through. That would have required someone to answer complicated questions like, “What is a Latino, after all?” and “How to address baseball’s history of racism?” Such questions would have gotten in the way of the celebratory, feel-good vibes.

Anything that promotes the legacy and history of baseball is, to my mind, a worthwhile endeavor in its own right. Even if it’s done for cynical or naive reasons, this promotion is a good thing, and will honor great players and encourage fans to give some thought to the achievements of great Hispanic players like Minnie Minoso, Luis Aparicio, Dolf “The Pride of Havana” Luque, and so many others.

If baseball truly wants to honor them, though, it can make sure that teenaged Dominicans aren’t asked to play for teams than can’t even be bothered to employ coaches who speak their language and that educational materials for a player pool that’s 25% Hispanic be bilingual. It can be more aggressive in training young Hispanic executives the way the NFL has trained young black coaching prospects.

Major League Baseball can, in other words, do things of substance, and let action, rather than reflection, serve as tribute to the immense contribution that Latino players have made to the game of baseball.