Behind the decline of MLB Black players

I grew up as a devoted fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson was my favorite player. Baseball, at that time, was by far the favorite game of the Black community. Football was viewed as a primarily white college sport and professional football and basketball were far behind professional baseball in popularity because football and basketball required going to college, something mostly unavailable to working class youth at that time. Professional baseball, on the other hand, has always been a sport that working class and immigrant youth could aspire to.

Today the tables have turned almost 180 degrees despite the fact that football and basketball are still heavily dependent on youths getting into a big-time college football or basketball program at schools where Black attendance is continually declining.

Baseball is viewed by many in the Black community as a white game and almost all Black youth are fans of football and basketball. This is true even though many in the Black community are effectively locked out of the very universities they root for by the enormous financial costs of getting a college education.

Today only 8.3 percent of Major League Baseball players are U.S. Black players, a decline from 19 percent a couple of decades ago; yet more than 40 percent of MLB players are non-white, many of them Black Latino players such as Red Sox “superstar” David Ortiz or the “non-Hispanic” Atlanta “superstar” Andruw Jones from Dutch-speaking Curaçao.

Today the sport of baseball is moving in two opposite directions, both away from the Black community. On one side are the white-privileged, organized U.S. amateur leagues. On the other, the participation and love of the game that existed in the Black community has been “transferred” to the Latin@ community, particularly those immigrants from the Caribbean. Where, prior to 1947, MLB players were 100-percent white, the league is now less than 60 percent white, yet the perception about race in baseball is just the opposite, and deservedly so. Why?

The big-business media portray this change in fan loyalty as emanating from the Black community itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth! Big money, as in every industry, is the “decider.” Sports are part of the entertainment industry. All industries under capitalism must obey “the bottom line.” Fan participation and loyalty follows, not leads, the money trail under capitalism.

Let’s say you are an athletic Black youth. Most athletes are not 6’6” to 7’ tall. That eliminates most athletes, Black or white, from making it in the National Basketball Association. Most athletes are not the behemoths that dominate the National Football League.

While the average MLB player is taller and bigger than the average athlete, a large percentage of MLB players are “relatively normal” size. Most athletes are of “relatively normal” size and the average salary and the length of career in MLB is greater than for any other sport.

Because of the remarkable history of past Black fan loyalty, MLB should logically be a bigger “magnet” for Black athletes than the NFL or the NBA. In any case, most athletic youths would be glad to make it in any professional sport, be it football, baseball or basketball. Professional sports careers, especially for youth in the projects, are a way to escape the poverty of the projects and make a better life for themselves.

Jackie Robinson didn’t select the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodger owners selected and signed him. The same is true at every level of team sports. Today’s MLB owners find it economically more rewarding to scout, sign and train players from the Caribbean than spend the same money scouting, signing and training players from the Black community.

While we should demand that the fabulously rich MLB owners do more to recruit players from the Black community, MLB discrimination pales before the insulting attitude that prevails at the college level. MLB prefers to draft college players over high school players because college players are better trained and more developed.

MLB teams need to spend less time and money to develop players they find in college to get them to the point where the player would be ready to play in the majors. MLB would draft Black college players, if they existed, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association has designed a tracking system that pushes Black athletes almost exclusively into college football and basketball. The players aren’t there to be drafted because college baseball is almost “lily-white.”

There are no two ways to say it: the NCAA hierarchy is racist. The NCAA tracks Black athletes into football and basketball because that is where the money is. Billions of dollars are involved in these college “amateur” sports. This is big business. Millions are paid to (mostly) white coaches and fabulous multi-million dollar facilities are built to house the “games,” while the NCAA bans payments to the impoverished Black players who are tracked into these sports. Many of these players never even earn a diploma and end up back in the projects with no future, while the big-business colleges reap the benefits.

Author Kyle Veasey wrote, “Out of 62 baseball programs sponsored by the six major [college - ed.] conferences, none have a Black head coach. ... The NCAA says a school can offer no more than 11.7 scholarships to baseball players” while football gets 85. “The athlete from a poor family who wants to pay for college is, more often than not, out of luck. Full scholarships are rare in college baseball, with most players getting only a percentage of their tuition bill paid for. ... The Black players that do appear in college baseball usually have football scholarships.” (“More than the ball is white,” The Decatur Daily, July 9, 2005)

As a result, Black players with many major college baseball teams number only one or none on the entire team and few major college teams have as many as four Black players. Also the attendance at college games is almost totally white, at the same time that college baseball attendance is rising,

A big spotlight needs to be put on the NCAA’s racist policies. Can we allow these racists to “kidnap” the beautiful game of baseball that the Black community played such an important role in creating?

The legacy of Jackie Robinson is under attack by the NCAA. In the 1960s, many progressives, especially activist college students, picketed and disrupted games whenever the South African apartheid regime sent its athletes here. Black construction workers picketed and disrupted lily-white construction projects, demanding jobs. Can’t we do something similar today? Isn’t it about time?