The former Yankee Gary Sheffield is notoriously sensitive to slights, and so one might be quick to dismiss his charge that the Yankees are racist. But then another former Yankee with nearly two decades in the major leagues, Kenny Lofton, told the Associated Press, “All I can say is, Sheffield knows what he’s talking about.”

These are serious charges, made by respected players who have seen everything there is to see in baseball. So, what’s going on here?

It’s important to frame the question properly. A sking whether manager Joe Torre or the Yankees are racist is a useless question — I can’t prove Torre isn’t a racist any more than I can prove that he isn’t a mole for the Red Sox.

The better questions to ask are specific, and have to do with behavior rather than character: Have the Yankees avoided signing black players? Have they given fair chances to black players? Have they treated black players differently than they’ve treated other players? These are questions with concrete answers, and while the answers hardly paint the Yankees as a white supremacist organization, they do add a bit of weight to Sheffield’s claims.

“I know when I was there, the couple of blacks that were there, every one of them had an issue with the organization,” Sheffield said in an interview with HBO. “They had an issue with Joe Torre. They weren’t treated like everybody else.” He quickly pointed out that he wasn’t so much accusing Torre of being personally racist as going along with the Yankee Way — “it’s the way they do things around there” — but that charge was, if anything, even more inflammatory.

In 1996, Torre’s first season as manager of the Yankees, the club featured six black players in prominent roles: Dwight Gooden, Tim Raines, Charlie Hayes, Gerald Williams, Cecil Fielder, and Derek Jeter, whom Sheffield dismisses as not “all the way black.” (That team, it may be worth noting, was largely assembled by a black general manager, Bob Watson.) At various points since, the team has featured as many as four black players in prominent roles, even if you buy into Sheffield’s bizarre racial schematics and dismiss Jeter. In 2004, for instance, Sheffield and Lofton were joined by Tony Clark and Tom Gordon; in 2005, Sheffield, Gordon, Shawn Chacon, and Tony Womack all played. At other times, though, the team has not featured many black players at all. In 1999, Chili Davis was the only prominent black Yankee other than Jeter; the next year, David Justice was the only one, and in 2002, Rondell White was the only one. In 2001 and 2003, Jeter was the only black player who had significant playing time.

The Yankees’ main prejudice is in favor of players who will help them win; during the Torre era they’ve relied on white and black Americans, as well as Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Venezuelan stars. At various points in the last 11 years, up to a quarter of their roster has been black — a proportion about twice that of the general black population in baseball. This hardly supports charges of racism. The team did have a fiveyear period, though, in which it featured hardly any black players at all, and over last two years, Sheffield has been the only black player other than Jeter to earn real playing time.

Have black players had their fair chances on the Yankees? On the whole, I’d say so. Players like Williams, Womack, and White were given playing time despite being horrible; Lofton was treated as a part-time player, but that was because he was the fourth-best of the four starting-caliber outfielders the team carried in 2004.

The third concrete question is whether black players have been treated differently than other players have been. Again, the record is mixed. Raines, Hayes, and Davis were all treated as clubhouse leaders in the Bronx, and Gooden and Darryl Strawberry were given clean slates when the rest of baseball had given up on them. Lofton and Fielder, on the other hand, weren’t really treated with the deference you’d expect, given their achievements. These cases probably have more to do with the Yankees’ habit of stockpiling players they don’t need and leaving some to rot on the bench than with anything else, but can’t be wholly ignored. Nor can the fact that two respected, long-tenured players have complained of unfair treatment.

Judging by this record, the Yankees don’t look to be in any way meaningfully racist. Still, giving Sheffield and Lofton the credit of taking their claims in good faith — and I can’t think of a reason not to — there is, at least, a problem of perception here, and it’s one Yankees officials ought to treat seriously.

Take two premises. The first is that successful black athletes are often, and rightly, wary of prejudice. Black athletes are often unfairly stereotyped as lazy, stupid, hostile, or disgruntled, even when they patently aren’t any of these things. The second is that a white man of Joe Torre’s generation is, in the course of things, going to see the world a bit differently than a world-class black athlete 30 years younger than he is will.

If you grant these premises, this controversy looks entirely natural, the sort of thing in which no party is really to blame. Lofton, for instance, complained about batting ninth while in pinstripes. That doubtless had more to do with Torre’s preference for having a second leadoff hitter at the bottom of the order than anything else — possibly a dumb strategy, but not a racist one. It’s easy to see, though, how a simple lack of communication could lead to a touchy player taking a strategic choice as a slight, and extrapolating from there along racial lines. Similarly, Sheffield says that he, Lofton, and Womack were often singled out in clubhouse meetings, instead of being called in for face time with the skipper. I find it far more plausible that they were being called out because they deserved it and because they weren’t longtime Yankees rather than because they were black — but it’s not hard to see how miscommunication could lead the players to feel disrespected.

None of this is an argument for sensitivity for its own sake, but Sheffield and Lofton have made really unusual and extraordinary claims, for which there are only so many explanations. The Yankees may be a truly racist organization; the players may be lying; the players may be spoiled jocks looking for reasons to feel disrespected, Torre may be a cad. Finally, there may be real, if relatively minor, issues here, nearly inextricable from egotism, managerial thoughtlessness, and baseball’s historically racist culture, which can lead people to see racism where there is none. This last explanation seems the likeliest for what went wrong here.

It really wouldn’t hurt the Yankees at all to keep the problem in mind when they start looking for a new manager, as they probably will after this season. It’s hard enough to run a ballclub without this sort of nonsense getting in the way.

tmarchman@nysun.com