Black Ball Pt. 1

In 1975, black baseball players made up 27% of all major league rosters. Today, American born black players make up about 8%, a 19% drop in a little over 30 years. The percentage of black players is actually much higher than that; but that's if you count Hispanic players of African descent (Vladimir Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, etc.). Hispanic players, like hispanic people in general, tend to all get lumped in together no matter where they are from and no matter what their ethnic background is. In general, when commentators talk about the dwindling black population in major league baseball, they are talking about American born black people.

A lot of ink has been expended to try and explain the cause of this "problem." The consensus seems to be that 1) the game of baseball is too slow/boring for the inner city black kids who were raised on the more action generating sports of football/basketball and 2) that MLB, in turn, has not done a good job at promoting the sport in inner city areas. The first point I will discuss later on, probably part two of this post.
As to the second point, that MLB has been lax in its efforts to promote the sport in inner city areas, that is of course true, for myriad of reasons. Gary Sheffield got into a lot of trouble when he said that one of the reasons for this was because Latin players are easier to control than Black players. His point, while unskillfully delivered and mildly prejudiced, makes sense. All Latin American players except for ones in Puerto Rico are not subject to the draft, which means that a team that "discovers" said ballplayer does not have to compete with any other teams for his services. The team can pay him whatever they want, knowing full well that a) he will not get offers from any other teams, and b) it's an enormous amount of money in context. Black American players are subject to the draft, so you cannot control a player in the same fashion. American Black players have other options and often times other sports in addition to the standard bonus structure for first round picks. Finally you cannot "ship" him back to the island so to speak if he "acts up". As a further example, look at how Puerto Rican baseball has suffered since the island became subject to the draft... where are the Puerto Rican stars post Carlos Beltran, Ivan Rodriguez, and Carlos Delgado? Putting all of that money into scouting a player only to see him taken by another team is not a good use of a precious resources. As a result, players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are, objectively speaking, better investments.
The other side of the scouting coin is the inferiority of competition in our inner cities. I'm not sure if this is a cause or an effect of the decline in American Black ballplayers; what I do know is that I played in an inner city baseball league in high school. The upkeep on the fields was terrible, and most of the non-white/non-Hispanic teams had a hard time filling their roster spots. Baseball becomes less of a priority, which further exacerbates the above problems. Talent disperses into football and basketball, making it harder to find, and really not worth a scouts time. Sure, he could look for great athletes who got roped onto the baseball team after basketball season was over (which is pretty much how we recruited a few of our players), but again that is a high risk little reward investment.
Travel ball or non-scholastic league ball has its own problems, cost being one of them. I can only go off my experiences, which can help to explain another problem. I played Dixie ball when I lived down south, and after a very successful season I was selected to play on the regional all-star team. The makeup of the team was pretty much the children of all the coaches, and in particular the well-off coaches. The son of a prominent doctor, dealership owners, lawyers etc. Now, some of these guys were really good and more than deserved to be on the team (the son of the doctor was our best pitcher), but some of them were only slightly above average and a few of them were terrible. My team had three players selected but only two of us belonged. If a third player from our team was to be selected, it should have been our "PWT," our poor white third baseman who was tied for our team lead in home runs. He wasn't particularly connected though. Looking back, and you know how memory is, I can remember three players on our team (including myself) who were not the child of a coach or at the very least a friend of a coach.
While we were practicing before our first game, my dad pulled me aside. "Pito, I just want to tell you that you're not one of them, you weren't an automatic selection. Don't get discouraged if you don't start." I didn't get what he meant at the time. I was not the greatest batting practice hitter but I was scorching the ball in practice and fielding the ball flawlessly, plus I was one of the top three hitters during the regular season, I just knew that I would start. It wasn't to be (and it wasn't until later that I understood what he was telling me), I sat on the bench while the starting shortstop flailed at pitches and fielded like his hands were made of cast iron skillets. Our team, particularly our pitching (I'm telling you that doctors kid was good), was pretty strong, so we only lost one game during the round robin. I didn't get up to the plate at all; my only appearance was as a pinch runner during our only loss. Finally, during the quarterfinals, I came in the game to bat for our "star" shortstop who had popped out in his previous at-bat. I played the rest of the game, smashed two doubles, walked, and played fine in the field. I was sure to get more playing time now... it was my last time coming to the plate. I came in as a defensive replacement for our right fielder in the finals. We won the regional championship so really I shouldn't complain, it always feels good to be a champion. But I was more than a little discouraged about how it turned out.

I've heard similar stories, both in person and from various black sportswriters. It's probably not that prominent, particularly once you get to high school age and the coaches only care about winning. Maybe the winnowing process starts before then though, so by the time you get to high school age the choice has already been made for you. Next time I'll talk about the second part, about baseball's lack of appeal to young black men in the city because of its perceived boringness.