I’m in no position to question Hunter’s views, however, I think his allegations that “baseball” (The Organization) is looking only for darker skin color and not really caring where it hails from. This, I think, is a heaping pile of stink. I do think there is still racism in the game, the country, the world. However, I really believe that most people (all races, colors, creeds) simply want to see the best excel, no matter the contest. We have an African American President, just 60-odd years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. I don’t care who hits the home run or strikes out the last batter or scores the touchdown or basket, so long as the team I root for wins the game. And I want our President to succeed because we NEED him to succeed (try to hold your political rants for a moment, please!). I’m not pollyanna and I know there’s an evil underbelly to this country that still sees race first and character a way distant second.
This article on Milton Bradley on racism in Chicago came out today, too. Whatever you think of Bradley, suspend it for a moment and ponder these comments:
“Well, I mean unless you go out there and you’re Superman — you’re Andre Dawson, you’re Ernie Banks, you’re in the Hall of Fame — then it’s going to be tough,” Bradley said. “People are just the way they are.
[...]
Bradley said the worst part of his time in Chicago was having his 3-year-old child called a “derogatory name” at school.
“I was worried about my family, about my kids,” he said. “The worst part of it all, the last straw is when I found out that my kid has been called a derogatory name at school.
“Three-year-olds shouldn’t be getting called names. That’s coming straight from the home. When we confronted the school and had the meeting with the parents, the parents totally denied it, but that comes from the home.”
[...]
“I went out one time, when a buddy of mine came in town to visit right before the All-Star break. And I go to a restaurant and I hear a guy bad-mouthing myself and [Alfonso] Soriano, saying how terrible we were and how we didn’t deserve anything and we should go back to the ghetto where we came from and all that kind of stuff.”
Hey, people suck. People have been mean and cruel and unkind since we first crawled out of the primordial ooze. That doesn’t mean baseball (“The Organization”) has an agenda to further that stuff. Says Calcaterra at NBC/HBT:
The fact that more and more of baseball’s black players happen to come from a couple hundred miles south of an artificial political border doesn’t mean that there is no one around to receive the torch passed down from Jackie Robinson, nor does the fact that baseball has spent millions to develop Latin American talent mean that the sport has turned its back on U.S.-born blacks. And while, like Hunter, I’d like to see more U.S. blacks playing the game, to suggest, as he does, that Major League Baseball has some plot to overlook them in favor of international players is plain dumb. If anything baseball would love to have it the opposite way. After all, U.S.-born blacks are subject to the draft and can be paid peanuts for years. Dominican or Venezuelan players get big signing bonuses. At least the good ones do.
Hunter’s comments speak to our nation’s profound immaturity when it comes to race. A mindset that makes rigid and often artificial census categories like “black” and “Hispanic” take on much more significance than is warranted and causes us to lose sight of what’s really important. What’s important in my view? The big picture: baseball is a truly international, multi-ethnic game in ways that, say, American football will never be, and that if there’s a meritocracy anywhere in this country, it’s in professional sports.
Take a peek at the chart I included to the right. It gets to Craig’s point about non-whites (excluding the increased Asian influence). While the data is only through 2007, the percentage has ebbed and flowed, but remains higher than it was in 1991. And isn’t that the bigger picture that we need to remember? It’s not that baseball (“The Organization”) has a subversive plot to oust all men of color.
What’s the reason ”inner city blacks” have turned away from baseball? Facilities? Costs? Time to make the pros? Pace of game? Lack of scholarships at colleges? The last of those was a new idea to me as I read the original article:
MLB, or perhaps minor league franchises, he says, should help finance NCAA programs and provide more scholarships. There are only 11 scholarships for Division I baseball teams.
“The colleges have corrupted baseball,” says Boras, whose son plays at Southern California, “because they have taken away the scholarships. They’ve taken away America’s pastime from the grass-root level of homes.”
Says Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker, “Killed it.”
Baseball’s amateur draft also creates a problem, Boras says, for the unwillingness to pay the same draft bonuses received by NFL and NBA players.
Of course Boras’ last comment (effectively saying “it’s about the money, stupid“) is a bit silly as only the Top 10 or so players make ridiculous draft bonuses. Though, he makes an interesting point about the number of scholarships. Only 11 scholarships only at the D1 schools? That was new to me. If that was doubled, would we see more “Torii’s” to join the “Toby’s”? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, I think superior talent is found, no matter the location or the color. It’s then up to the kid to decide which sport he wants to try to excel in, because let’s face it, most pro ballplayers are talented athletes in more than one sport. Then it’s a function of “time to riches” and “time to pros”. It’s a matter of the athlete choosing baseball over football or basketball.
As for the scouts not going to the inner cities, I can’t answer that. I do suspect that if the next Jackie Robinson was indeed “out there” now, that he’d be found. The amount of info these days is staggering and there are few “surprises”. Heck, Joe Posnanski was riffing on this Monday:
Holy cow. There was a time in baseball when baseball phenoms would just show up, when blazing fast and switch-hitting sluggers would wander out of the Oklahoma mines and 17-year-old pitchers throwing 100 mph would walk off of farms in Iowa. But now — you can follow baseball prospects through high school, through college, through the minor leagues, you can see film on them on the Internet, you can hear scouts talk about them, you can find prospect lists that go all the way to No. 2,000.
Baseball is a meritocracy. Talent will be found by the teams. Young athletes have a world of choices these days and the elite ones are not all going to choose baseball. The path to the pros and riches might be shorter (not necessarily easier) in basketball and football than it is for baseball. There are inherent economic issue that work against baseball. And there will always be racist fans. None of this means that baseball (“The Organization”) is behind this trend in a subversive manner.
It is difficult to talk about race. I would tend to cut Torii Hunter some slack — he’s always struck me as a good guy — because it is difficult to talk about race.
In your post, the thing that stands out is the trend line showing a steep decline in African-American MLB participation. That’s a cause for concern. For the moment, ignore the reasons for the decline, and focus on the decline itself. Why is it that this generation has put so few African-Americans on MLB baseball diamonds? Does this generation have many undiscovered Torii Hunters out there?
I’m tempted to point out that while African-Americans are underrepresented in baseball, they are overrepresented in football and basketball. Could it be that African-American athletes are disproportionally drawn to these two sports, to the exclusion of baseball? This seems unlikely to me. Basketball generally requires athletes to be unusually tall; football generally requires athletes to have unusual combinations of size and speed. Even given the popularity of football and basketball, there should be a substantial number of African-American athletes remaining to play baseball at the highest levels.
I think that the contrast with football and basketball is instructive. In basketball, they say that you can’t teach someone to be tall. It’s also true that finding a tall athlete takes little scouting talent. It’s similar in football: it doesn’t take much for a scout to notice that an athlete weighs 220 lbs and can run the 40 in 4.4. Arguably, baseball talent (in particular, young and raw baseball talent) is harder to spot. Baseball scouting takes a more sustained commitment.
Another contrast between baseball and football/basketball is the relative importance of each in college sport. Let’s look at this from my Southern California perspective: if there’s a talented athlete playing high school football in a poor Southern California neighborhood, what are the chances that U.S.C. would miss out on that player? If that same athlete was successful in high school basketball, what are the chances that U.C.L.A. would fail to notice? There is intense competition among division I schools for young talent. Is the competition the same for young baseball talent? I don’t think so. This means to me that some of this talent might be missed.
(on the topic of college baseball, note that only 6% of college baseball players are black. That’s hard to understand. http://hamptonroads.com/2009/07/case-disappearing-black-baseball-player)
Ultimately, I come back to my original thought, which is that it is difficult to talk about race. It is easier to talk about baseball. I want to see a MLB filled with great baseball players. There’s no question that baseball became a better sport when the color barrier was broken. I’m not just saying that the sport became more just and more American — I’m saying that the quality of play on the field improved dramatically. I’m thinking of the great African-American players of my childhood: Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Willie Stargell, Hank Aaron, Lou Brock. I’m probably missing 50 other guys who played just as well. I cannot imagine what baseball would have been like without half of these guys, or 3/4 of these guys. Yet, that’s the baseball we have now, given the 50% – 75% decline in the number of active African-American players.
I have to conclude that this decline is terrible for the game of baseball. Regardless of the cause.
b4 i even read the rest of this thing, u can be black and dominican, white and dominican, people have no idea that race color nationality and ethnicity are all entirely separate things, race is kinda made bs but, his color is black, his race is what they call it negroid? unless they updated that term and his ethnicity is DR, i assume he was born there so his nationality would be the same
I live in the burbs of long island, tons of kids play n follow baseball, its just not the same in the inner cities//boros, alot of Spanish//Latin w/e u wanna call them will follow but not so much play. There is a hoop almost every 20 feet you look sometimes. Baseball needs like 10 kids to play and equipment. Basketball? All you need is a ball, hell you don't even need your own just show up to the park on a warm day. Is that why soccer is world wide popular? I've seen kids MAKE a ball out of trash and kick it around, you literally can't be too poor to play that game. Maybe access to the game plays a big role Even the music, rap often talks about basketball as being 1 of the only ways to get out of the "hood". How many football players come out of inner city's?