What ever happened to the black baseball player? It seems like more and more, baseball is become a white-only game, as far as Americans go. There are of course oodles of Latin players all over the major leagues, but there are currently very few black players making an impact in the major leagues. Yes, two of the best players in the league are black, with Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey, Jr. But one must also take notice that Griffey has been playing for 16 years and Bonds for 18. So they don't really reflect the state of race in the game right now, they reflect what it was 15 years ago. Additionally, both of their fathers were legitimate Major League stars (Bobby Bonds and Ken Griffey, Sr.). They grew up around the game and were of at least middle class households (baseball players didn't begin to make obscene amounts of money until the 1980s). I'm not sure what happened, but at some point young black men started to either not play baseball or be discriminated against to a point that excluded them from Major League baseball. I made a list of young black players that I could think of that play in the majors right now. This isn't exhaustive, but it's almost all of the relevant ones. For these purposes, "young and black" means under 30, African-American (not Hispanic), born (or at least raised) in the United States. Here's what I came up with.
| Dontrelle Willis | | C.C. Sabathia | | Daryle Ward |
| Vernon Wells | | Tike Redman | | Derrek Lee |
| Chone Figgins | | | | |
Ward, Redman, and Figgins are role players that have gone in between the minors and majors their entire careers and won't really make much of an impact on any team. Sabathia and Willis are very young and both pretty good pitchers. Lee and Wells are both solid players, but Lee turns 29 this year and is thus pretty close to not being included in this list.
Once Griffey and Bonds retire, who is going to be left? How did we go from an era when Bob Gibson and Satchel Paige were two of the best pitchers in the league and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were two of the best hitters of all time to an era when Derrek Lee and Vernon Wells are the best young black hitters in the league and Dontrelle Willis and C.C. Sabathia are the best black pitchers? I doubt that there is some systematic exclusion of black baseball players among MLB teams, but something is happening. Is it that more and more young black males are focusing on basketball or football instead of baseball? While that may be the case, I doubt that it is much different now than it was in the 80's. If you wanted to take a racist view of it, you could say that baseball is the sport that relies least on potential and most on solid performance over a span of years and that black men tend to not have the dedication or drive. But I think that's crap.
I don't think major league baseball will ever get to a point at which it is a black man's league, as the NBA currently is. If we're being perfectly honest, we all know that the average black man is more athletic than the average white man, which, in the top levels of sports, gives black men an advantage in basketball and certain "skills" positions in football (i.e. the ones that don't require you to just be fat - white people are pretty good at that). But baseball is a sport that doesn't reward pure, raw athleticism as much as football and basketball. Baseball requires specific skills that you have to work at constantly to maintain and that aren't natural to human movement. That's not to say that basketball and football don't require more than athleticism - they undoubtedly do. Baseball just requires more. And that sort of levels the playing field a bit.
But that doesn't resolve the issue of why there is a diminishing quantity of quality black professional baseball players. The fact is, I really don't know what the deal is. It probably has nothing to do with money. If someone is trying to decide between playing baseball or football or basketball, baseball will make them more money by far (there's no salary cap in baseball). Maybe it is that baseball has changed dramatically from a primarily urban game in the '50s and '60s that attracted many black players to a primarily suburban and rural game that attracts few black players while attracting more white players. I think that the best way to look at it is in comparison with Latin baseball players. Other than soccer, baseball is the biggest sport in much of Latin America. They grow up playing it and nothing else. If baseball requires so much dedication and practice to develop and maintain the skills needed to play at a high level, then those focusing on multiple sports will have a tougher time succeeding at baseball than at another sport. At UT recently, we saw both Ricky Williams and Cedric Benson try to play professional (minor league) baseball during the football offseason, and both did horribly at baseball. Former University of Michigan quarterback Drew Henson (who is white, for the record) left school to sign a huge contract with the New York Yankees. He floundered around in the minor leagues and never fulfilled expectations and recently came back to the NFL and is now with the Cowboys. So maybe, just maybe, black athletes at the highest level have multitudes of options and thus don't succeed as much at baseball as at football and basketball and, as a result, choose one of the other two. White athletes at the highest level often don't have the same elite ability at several sports and thus can focus specifically on baseball, developing those skills to an extent that a multi-sport athlete cannot. It's just a theory and might be way off, but I have nothing else.
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