Marge Schott Was A Five-Tool Bigot Who Would Have Thrived In Any Era

It’s nearly impossible to relay a single fact about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott that does not stop an unfamiliar recipient dead in their tracks. For example:

• She was suspended from baseball in 1993 for the repeated use of racial slurs, which included referring to Reds stars Eric Davis and Dave Parker as her “million-dollar niggers.”
• A few years after her suspension, MLB forced her into selling the team, in part because she said, of Adolf Hitler, “Everything you read, when he came in he was good. They built tremendous highways and got all the factories going.”
• She kept a Nazi armband in a desk drawer in her house.
• She was an alcoholic, and was probably drunk when she took the field before Game 1 of the 1990 World Series and told the assembled crowd that she was dedicating the Series to American troops “in the Middle West.” Thirty minutes later, she was on the field once again, this time with television cameras rolling, reiterating that the Series was being played in honor of “our wonderful men and women over in the Far East.”
• She was enraged when the Reds won the 1990 World Series in a 4-0 sweep, because the shortened series robbed her of lucrative gate receipts.
• She used to let her dog, a big St. Bernard named Schottzie, piss and shit on the Reds’ field.

This is just a small sampling of facts about Schott that can be found in Marge Schott: Unleashed, by former Cincinnati Post sportswriter Mike Bass. Aside from being a juicy, well-reported investigation into Schott’s scandalous tenure as owner of the Reds, it is also a fascinating artifact of a time when access and resources were more readily available to sports reporters. The book was released in 1993, the same year that Schott was suspended, and features dozens of on-the-record testimonies from people who worked closely with her. News of Schott’s racist behavior was slow to escape Cincinnati, and when it did, the national media often provided surface-level coverage. The situation cried out for a more complete portrait of Schott and her place in the game, and Bass provided one nearly simultaneous to the scandal’s unfolding.