Colin Cowherd, a person paid tremendous amounts of money to discuss his opinions on professional sports, said on Thursday that he doesn’t believe baseball to be a complex sport. Then, to add insult to insanity, he cited as evidence the fact that Major League Baseball includes many Dominican-born ballplayers.

For real. Here’s the quote:

“It’s too complex? I’ve never bought into that ‘baseball is too complex.’ Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic.”

That’s not behind-the-scenes banter revealed by TMZ through a vindictive producer. That’s something Cowherd broadcast to the world on a radio show named for him.

Unsurprisingly, Dominican-born baseball players (and many other sensible people) objected to the comments. And after Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista threatened to “rip (Cowherd) a new one” if the host did not explain his statement, Cowherd explained his statement.

Via ESPN:

“I could’ve made the point without using one country, and there’s all sorts of smart people from the Dominican Republic,” Cowherd said Friday during The Herd. “I could’ve said a third of baseball’s talent is being furnished from countries with economic hardships, therefore educational hurdles. For the record, I used the Dominican Republic because they’ve furnished baseball with so many great players.”…

“I understand that when you mention a specific country, they get offended,” Cowherd said. “I get it. I do. And for that, I feel bad. I do. But I have four reports in front of me … where there are discussions of major deficiencies in the education sector at all levels. … It wasn’t a shot at them. It was data. Five, seven years ago I talked about the same subject. Was I clunky? Perhaps. Did people not like my tone? I get it. Sometimes my tone stinks.

“I think when you host a radio show, just like Jon Stewart hosts a show, I think sometimes I bring up stuff … that makes people cringe. I’m not saying there’s not intelligent, educated people from the Dominican Republic. I cringe at the data too.”

So there’s that.

To be fair, Cowherd is right that the standards for education in the Dominican Republic are generally well lower than those in most of the other countries that produce big-league baseball players. And following his original comments Thursday, Cowherd did say that Dominican players do not typically have the same academic opportunities as their counterparts elsewhere.

But the comments nonetheless seem to imply a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a smart baseball player smart, as it’s an entirely different type of intelligence than the one typically bred in academic institutions. Miguel Cabrera could be rifling through Umberto Eco novels behind closed doors for all anyone knows, but that has very little to do with what makes him one of the league’s most intelligent hitters.

Maybe better developed classroom and literacy backgrounds help some players develop baseball IQ quicker than others, but there are smart big-league ballplayers from everywhere. That some of them originally hail from places with poor education systems just shouldn’t in any way discredit baseball’s complexity.

Two weeks ago, ESPN announced that Cowherd would be leaving the network after an amicable split.