There’s nothing wrong with a team’s firing a minority manager. Minority managers have to be hired to be in position to be fired. Once they are hired, they should enjoy the same accolades or face the same perils as their white male counterparts. The problem with their being fired is there are so few that when one of them is fired, it’s magnified.

That’s what has happened with the Atlanta Braves’ dismissal last week of Fredi Gonzalez, the only Latino manager and one of only three minority managers in Major League Baseball.

So much for Commissioner Rob Manfred’s mythical minority hiring initiative.

Gonzalez’s involuntary departure leaves Washington’s Dusty Baker and Dave Roberts of Los Angeles as the only minority managers in the majors. Baker is African-American, Roberts the son of a black father and a Japanese mother and a native of Okinawa, Japan.

Baker and Roberts were hired last November, meaning Gonzalez was the only holdover minority manager from last season. Lloyd McClendon of Seattle did not make it back this season.

High-level front office and managerial jobs have become hard to land for blacks and Latinos. Manfred has talked promisingly about minority prospects, but he has done nothing on their behalf while pushing the Milwaukee Brewers to hire David Stearns, a young white man, as their general manager.

The commissioner has created a pipeline that he hopes will feed young minorities into significant major league jobs, but the way teams have ignored minorities the pipeline seems destined to become clogged with unsuccessful job seekers.

The Gonzalez firing has done nothing to encourage the enhancement for minority hiring. His dismissal could be seen coming because the Braves began the season so terribly, losing 28 of their first 37 games.

But Gonzalez has not been given much room or time to fail in his major league managerial career. In Miami he was fired with a 34-36 record in 2010 after the Marlins had two successive winning seasons under him.

Succeeding Hall-of-Famer Bobby Cox in Atlanta in 2011, he directed the Braves to 279 victories in his first three years, averaging 93 a year, but has since encountered a strategic decision to rebuild with youth, a decision that led the Braves to shed Jason Heyward, Justin Upton, Andrelton Simmons, Shelby Miller and Craig Kimbrel. Gonzalez was left with nothing to work with. Cox could not have won with that team.

“I don’t know what they expected with the roster they put together,” remarked Gary Cohen, the play-by-play television announcer for the Mets, a Braves’ division rival.

Although the Gonzalez firing has left MLB without a Latino manager, it has perhaps served a purpose. It has focused attention on the absence of Latino managers in MLB, where Latino players make up 24.5 percent of the work force. Gonzalez’s dismissal has triggered an unusually heavy news media reaction to MLB’s poor record on minority hiring.

As readers of this column know, I have been writing about this issue for years and have become increasingly critical of the commissioner, whether he be Manfred or Bud Selig, for his failure to do something about the problem. My criticism of Manfred has prompted him to stop talking to me. Life nevertheless goes on. So will my criticism.

I will also criticize writers who write stupid things about minority hiring, even though they think they are helping. They do not help the cause. I cite as a prime and most recent example an article on The Undefeated, a brand new website, courtesy of ESPN.com, devoted to African-Americans in sports.

Headlined “MLB’s most troubling diversity problem,” the article by Ryan Cortes undermines the site’s validity with its blatant mistakes.

The first mistake the article makes is quoting Dr. Richard Lapchick’s annual Racial and Gender Report Card, which gives MLB an ‘A’ for its racial hiring. “As Rob Manfred took over as the new MLB Commissioner,” Lapchick writes, “the League Office maintained the good grades achieved under Bud Selig with an A+ for hiring people of color…”

How can The Undefeated question MLB’s racial diversity but quote Lapchick without questioning him and his grading?

The article also quoted Lapchick as saying there were four “general managers of color” on opening day when there were only three unless Lapchick/The Undefeated includes Michael Hill of Miami. But the article goes on to quote Lapchick as saying “there is also just one CEO/president of color in the sport (Michael Hill)…”

Contrary to what Lapchick and Cortes believe and say, Hill is not the Marlins’ president and CEO. David Samson is the Marlins president – that’s what it says under Samson’s picture on page 25 of the Marlins’ media guide – they have no CEO and Hill is president of baseball operations (page 27).

A president of baseball operations is not president of the team. Ten teams besides the Marlins have presidents of baseball operations, and another team (Arizona) has a chief baseball officer (Tony La Russa).

If The Undefeated or anyone else wants to gauge the depth of MLB’s minority problem, study the hires of the last two years. Since May 2014 clubs have hired or promoted these executives and managers:

• Three club presidents, all white males
• A chief baseball officer and 11 presidents of baseball operations, all white males
• An executive vice president of baseball operations, white male
• A senior vice president of baseball operations, white male
• Sixteen general managers, 13 of them white males
• Fourteen managers, 12 of them white males

That’s a total of 47 hires, 42 of them white males. Only 10.6 percent are minorities, which would translate to a .106 batting average, not nearly good enough to make any team, major league or minor.

In contrast to that percentage, of the 864 players on opening-day rosters and disabled list, 309 were foreign born or black, a ratio of 36 percent.

No matter how many blacks or Latinos might flood the market, a commissioner can’t force a team to hire one as a manager or a general manager. But Manfred can do better than he and Selig have done.

For one thing, Manfred can use the force of his office to convince owners and general managers that it is in the best interests of baseball to hire a black or a Latino. He could convince them that it makes good business sense, depending on what city the team occupies.

For another, Manfred might actually enforce the rule that requires clubs seeking occupants of decision-making positions to interview a minority. See that the clubs conduct serious interviews and not sham sessions to satisfy the requirement. Don’t let the clubs put up a straw man for an interview, as four clubs did last year, interviewing candidates who had no chance for the general manager job just to satisfy the requirement.

Better yet, revise the rule to require clubs to interview as many minorities as white guys. That policy wouldn’t insure the hiring of a minority candidate but would enable more minorities to be interviewed and be in better position to have a chance to be hired. The more minority candidates an owner or a general manager interviews the more likely it is that he might actually find somebody he likes.

For all or any of this to happen, though, the commissioner needs to impress upon owners the importance to diversify and broaden the prospective pool of executive and managerial talent.

And they might want to consider this factor. If they hire a few more minority managers and general managers the next time they fire one, it will produce less of an outcry.

Manfred, however, seems to be satisfied with his phantom pace of trying to solve the problem. I guess he figures if Selig could get away with not solving it for two decades he can get away with it for five years. By not trying to force or pressure anyone to do something he doesn’t want to do, he won’t create enemies.

PITCHERS WIN AND SO DO THEIR WINS

A couple of years ago I was told by a supposedly knowledgeable baseball man that wins for pitchers didn’t mean anything, that too many varying factors went into crediting a starter with a win. So as I look at pitching statistics today, do I just ignore these won-lost records and say they are irrelevant:

• Chris Sale                         9-0
• Jake Arrieta                     8-0
• Stephen Strasburg         7-0

No, I will not ignore them and write them off as irrelevant. I will follow them to see how far they can go into the season unbeaten, how low their earned run averages go and which one finishes with the best record.

As of Sunday, their e.r.a.s were Arrieta 1.29; Sale 1.58; Strasburg 2.80.

HIT .468, SLIDE HEADFIRST, BREAK THUMB

Are players really stupid?

They are told constantly, repeatedly, over and over, don’t slide headfirst; it’s dangerous. It’s an injury waiting to happen. Hand, wrist, neck, head; take your pick. But the instinct is too great for them to ignore.

Most players get away with it, but not all. Josh Reddick of Oakland is the latest casualty. He slid headfirst into second base against the New York Yankees last week and suffered a broken left thumb when Starlin Castro stepped on it.

Reddick, who can be a free agent after the season, had collected 22 hits in his last 47 at-bats (.468) over 14 games.