This Rapper Needs a Hit

As far as I know, most everyone in New York wants Lastings Milledge to succeed. He has to start doing himself some favors, though.Last year, the justly hyped Milledge made his major league debut with the Mets after tearing up Triple-A and turned in a credible showing. He struck out in nearly a quarter of his at-bats over 56 games but displayed the talent that made him the team’s top prospect. None of this mattered, though, because Milledge more than lived up to the bad reputation he’d earned in high school and the minor leagues. Whether bumping fists with fans to celebrate a home run or showing up just more than an hour before a game was to start the day after some ostentatious malingering on the basepaths, Milledge took advantage of every opportunity to act like a broadly written parody of an oblivious, self-absorbed rookie, and was treated as such by fans, the press, and even members of his own team.This year, Milledge arrived to spring training amid much talk of a clean slate and the maturation all young men must undergo — an excellent thing all around, and not only for his sake. There was, after all, something mildly discomfiting about the spectacle of a mostly middle aged and white commentariat and fan base perceiving a young black player’s flamboyance as thuggishness. Baseball fans and writers can tolerate a lot, but they aren’t well suited to telling the difference between a clueless, boastful rookie sporting a fancy haircut and a would-be gangster. It seemed the best thing for everyone would be for Milledge, who’s currently on the disabled list, to keep his head down and work on his still developing game. After all, if he had hit .320 last year, he wouldn’t have been deemed a problem, but a charming character.Unhappily, Milledge has instead followed through on longstanding threats to get into the hip-hop game. As president and a producer for Soul-Ja Boi Records, Milledge is promoting the career of junior high school crony Immanuel Dent, now rapping under the name Manny D. This week, a press release went out touting Manny D’s soonto-surface record, and his earnest desire “to create positive music, which, he says, is ‘something that most rap music is lacking.'” You’ll guess the punchline easily enough. At souljaboirecords.com, you can check out the positivity, complete with hot fire from “L. Millz” on a track called “Bend Ya Knees”:“So much ice I got diamonds in my spokes … True pimps get chose by the top-notch hos … For me and my soldiers, a different bitch for every night…”Milledge’s rhymes are a lot more sedate than most of what’s on the Web site. The chorus to the above song, for instance, features Manny D declaiming, “Bend your knees, touch your toes/True players get chose by the top-notch hos/Smoking la, getting high … F— bad b—, f—hos…” and later observing that “N—turn b— when surrounded by the steel.” “If you got that good p—, get your hands up,” he instructs young women on “Get Cha Hands Up.”The real surprise here — and I’ll imagine many of you are just going to have to take my word for this — is that L. Millz is actually a reasonably talented aspiring hip-hop impresario. Manny D has a nice, lazily drawling flow and an agreeable voice, and while the low-key beats aren’t revolutionary, they’re more than serviceable. In a world where Dipset sells records by tonnage, the Mets’ fifth outfielder may actually be on to something. “Bend Ya Knees” is, ridiculous as it may be, better than a fair amount of critically acclaimed hip-hop I’ve heard lately. On the merits, there’s about as much reason to get outraged by L. Millz’s records as there would have been reason to be offended by Lenny Dykstra fronting a punk band called the Dead Kochs.Still, the issue with Milledge has always been about maturity and judgment, and fundamentally it’s been about appearances. No one will be shocked to learn that rich young athletes are boastful and use salty language from time to time, but neither will anyone will be shocked by the idea that part of baseball’s unwritten rulebook concerns not flaunting that. As everyone knows, Derek Jeter does not, in fact, go to the city’s most exclusive clubs to drink milk and engage lovely young women in discussions about Cormac McCarthy novels, but keeping up the pretense that this is what his nightlife amounts to is essentially part of his job. Similarly, I think most people would accept that insofar as part of Milledge’s job is to keep his act clean, putting his name on a record that hits the dread trifecta of the n-word, casual misogyny, and loose gun talk (while endorsing drug use to boot) probably isn’t the brightest idea.For the Mets, there’s a level on which this shouldn’t be an issue. Milledge’s real job is to play ball, not to avoid doing harmless things that might offend delicate sensibilities. Baseball is a business, though, and part of what matters in business is image. (Ask Don Imus, who — rightly, in my view — lost his job for using language that wasn’t much more loaded than what Milledge is playing around with.) Perhaps a young black man with cornrows and a dodgy past a lacing schlocky Bruce Hornsby loop with silly lyrics shouldn’t affect the way people view the Mets, but the truth is that it could, and that image is, rightly, very important to a team that once featured stars who sprayed bleach at reporters and threw firecrackers at children.On the strength of general manager Omar Minaya’s shrewd dealings and the great fortune of having two exuberant young superstars in Jose Reyes and David Wright, the climate around the Mets has changed over the last few years. Where once they were dour, stodgy, and bland — best personified by the utterly anonymous Todd Zeile’s utterly anonymous play (which itself represented an improvement on sociopathy) — they’re now radiant and joyous. The positive atmosphere surrounding the team is changing the way people treat them. Formerly a joke — even at periods of great success — the Mets now have a chance to become one of baseball’s flagship franchises.Lastings Milledge is not going to change that one way or the other, barring something a lot graver than a late arrival to a ballgame and a Manny D mixtape, but minor, symbolically resonant offenses can add up with terrible speed. In a statement to The New York Sun, the Mets said, “We disapprove of the content, language, and message of this recording, which does not represent the views of the New York Mets.”That’s good for the Mets, but not so good for Milledge. It’s getting harder to imagine him fulfilling his potential on the New York stage. Baseball’s difficult enough without making yourself into a sideshow.tmarchman@nysun.com

This Rapper Needs a Hit

This Rapper Needs a Hit

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