Baseball's Black Player: The Newest Endangered Species

This past April, Major League Baseball celebrated Jackie Robinson Day. The idea was to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Robinson's major league debut. It was just the latest occasion used to honor Robinson. It seems like every couple of years there's something of Robinson's to celebrate and every time it happens writers all across the country use the occasion to ask:

"What happened to the black ballplayer?"

The latest study shows that only 8.4 percent of major league rosters are made up of black players. Everybody seems to have a theory as to why and most of them fail to recognize some of the biggest reasons. I don't know if it's because they're afraid to say something that may be perceived as controversial or if it's because they're lazy and decide to just repeat what others have said.

The truth is that there are a number of reasons to blame as well as a number of people you can blame it on. Some of these you may have heard before and others will be fresh food for thought. Regardless, I think this is a conversation that begs to be had continuously instead of only on those occasions when Jackie Robinson's name is in the news.

The first and most painfully obvious reason is that baseball is a sport that's handed down from fathers to sons. Unfortunately, more than two-thirds of black children live in single-parent homes and 88 percent of those are headed by women. While baseball is regularly on television and still played in physical education classes, so much of what makes baseball so impressionable to a young kid is going to a ball game with pop or playing catch with him in the yard.

My father's from Europe and has absolutely no appetite for the sport but I guess there were other things that got me hooked. Most likely it was my friends. Nobody wants to be left out. I also grew up with Fernandomania and the 1988 Dodgers so that made it a little easier to get into. I don't really have a solution to this one but it does lead me right into my next one...

Major League Baseball decided it was more important to invest in nurturing young talent in the Dominican Republic than in the United States. While the Dodgers, Braves, Blue Jays, and a number of other major league clubs have had baseball academies in the Dominican for years, it wasn't until the last few years that academies were established in places like Compton, Atlanta, and Detroit.

I can't imagine that Santo Domingo has more kids growing up without a father than say, Tampa, and yet they chose to pour their resources there because they knew that both the operating costs and signing bonuses would be much cheaper. Now they want to pretend like these problems are new when they've just been avoiding them for years.

Speaking of Santo Domingo, my guess is that you can probably find a pick-up game on every other street corner. That leads me to the next reason. Baseball, unlike basketball, requires 17 other guys to get a game going. With organized leagues fading into the sunset there aren't nearly as many opportunities to get a game going. In Michael Sokolove's book The Ticket Out, about the 1979 Crenshaw High School baseball team, he writes about how you could show up at any park in the inner city on any day in the summer and find a game going on.

Why call 17 other guys when you can just put on your sneakers, grab a ball, and head to the nearest blacktop by yourself and play basketball? All you need is one other guy to get a game going. You can also put up a backboard anywhere. You can't put a baseball diamond on top of your garage.

Speaking of basketball, it's no coincidence that the 1979 Crenshaw team was the last team from the City to play for a baseball championship. That was also the year that Magic Johnson arrived in Los Angeles and took the city by storm. Where kids before his arrival wanted to be the next Bob Gibson, Joe Morgan, or George Foster, Magic made every kid in L.A. want to play basketball. Kids would stay at home and study his latest moves before going out onto the playground and trying those moves out themselves.

There's a direct correlation between basketball's increased popularity and baseball's decreased popularity during that time. Baseball just doesn't allow for the same type of creativity. Ozzie Smith might have been the closest thing in baseball and even he was nowhere close to Magic.

Basketball has probably been the biggest thorn in baseball's side as it relates to popularity among blacks. The problem is that Major League Baseball again has erred in not reminding young athletes that they have a million times better chance of becoming a professional baseball player than they do of becoming a basketball player. Sokolove writes in his book that if you're 6'5" and athletic and you want to play pro basketball there are at least a million other kids just like you. But if you are 6'5" and athletic and you play centerfield you are one in a million.

Because of both college baseball programs and the fact that there are 50 rounds in the Major League Baseball draft, chances are that if you're good enough, somebody will give you a chance to play, and in all likelihood you'll be able to either get a free education or even get paid to do it. I haven't even brought up the fact that baseball causes the least wear and tear on the body of all the major sports so you could play until you're 40 if you can cut it.

The next reason that baseball is lagging is because of economics. The sport has become much more expensive than it was when I was a kid. The best kids now play on traveling teams year-round and many kids from the inner cities can't afford the travel expenses. Rick Reilly had a fictitious story in his Sports Illustrated column last year about a neighbor who had to take out a second mortgage to keep up with the costs. Why are there no scholarship funds to help these kids compensate for their lack of funds? It's bad enough that many blacks don't consider baseball cool but now those same kids have to pay big bucks to play? That's absurd.

The last reason I want to bring up is the horrendous job that MLB has done in marketing it's players. They have relied way too heavily on using it's history to be the cornerstone of it's marketing strategy and that's useless now that you've lost at least one entire generation to the sport. What do those kids know about Rod Carew and Eddie Murray?

There are dozens of black players in baseball right now with great personalities, yet nobody knows anything about them. I doubt any of them have been asked, but I'm sure they'd all jump at the chance to help promote the sport. Dontrelle Willis, Juan Pierre, and Curtis Granderson are just three. Anybody who has heard Torii Hunter give an interview knows how likable and intelligent he is.

Forget about Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Gary Sheffield, and Ken Griffey. Those guys are all grown men with families who will be out of the game in four or five years. I'm talking about the young guys like Grady Sizemore, Vernon Wells, and Ian Snell. How come I don't see these guys in commercials or on billboards?

I wish that I had more solutions than problems. Unfortunately, I don't.

Baseball can continue to develop it's Revivinig Baseball in Inner Cities Program (R.B.I.) and that's a good start. Maybe we're just one Dwight Gooden or Tiger Woods-type away. Maybe it's about educating these kids more on Jackie Robinson.

One thing is for certain—as long as MLB fails to recognize these problems and continues to ignore their existence, I can only see that 8.4 percent decreasing even more.