Baseball

Major League Baseball and Race

Major League Baseball finally got an ‘A’ for race for it’s diversity in hiring, but the number of black players in the league has fallen once again, reaching the level of just 8.2 percent. This comes from The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card: Major League Baseball by Richard Lapchick (PDF from Ncaasports.com).

Now, I understand that race is always a sensitive issue. Being white, I’m apparently supposed to stay out of the conversation, but when it comes to leaps of logic and plain old-fashioned stupidity, I cannot stand by silently.

Yes, the number of black players has fallen to 8.2 percent in Major League Baseball. The percentage of black pitchers is just 3 percent. Is this something that warrants a complaint, an investigation and funding to try to change it?

There are problems with this report, and to understand it and for us to make real progress, they must be called out on it.

The question I have is what is the ideal racial proportions for Major League Baseball? Should the management jobs match societies numbers or baseball’s? You cannot have more than 100 percent when you add it all up. White players have remained constant at 58-60 percent of the league. Black players have dropped and Latino players have risen. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, certainly not to the level that we are being told. Going by the national affirmative action standards is not realistic, and to hold MLB to those numbers is unfair. This is not a typical workplace, and should not be treated like one.

Being a professional baseball player or a coach comes down to two things: baseball skills and baseball knowledge. Many of the jobs that are in professional sports have to do with that sport. Including gender equality in a baseball report card is unfair to the sport. When it comes to non-baseball positions within the franchise, those numbers should be kept completely different. You can’t lump all jobs within a franchise together and judge baseball for being fair or unfair.

For the sake of this piece, I’ll stick more with the major point of the report, which is that black players have fallen to an all-time low of 8.2 percent of the league. Unfortunately, there is a simple explanation for this, but not necessarily a simple solution.

Why Don’t Blacks Play Baseball Anymore

Black kids don’t play baseball as much as they used to. That is a fact, and if you find it unfortunate, then that’s fine. I’d love to see more athletes coming out of inner cities, but in today’s world, it’s not the most realistic idea. You don’t see pick-up baseball and stickball games in U.S. cities these days, but you sure as hell do in Latin America. There are great opportunities in basketball and football that there weren’t 40 years ago, as well.

Black kids have found other things to do. You can’t force them to play ball, just as you can’t with white kids. Five or ten years from now, I’d wager that black and white numbers are down as Latino numbers continue to rise. There are just too many options for kids in America these days, especially when compared to kids from Latin America. For many Latino kids, baseball is their chance out, their chance at making enough money to take care of their family, and at the same time, one of the only things to do.

In many of those countries, you don’t have the shopping malls, iPods, skateboard parks, 982 channels on television, televisions, theme parks, the Internet in every room of the house, etc. You play baseball or you work for a living, and you do it by 19 years old.

Now, I know this isn’t true for every child in every country in Latin America, and it’s a bit of a stereotype, but it’s an accurate comparison to the United States more often than not. It’s not just black kids that aren’t playing ball as much, it’s American kids.

Another reason that the black numbers are so low is that black representation in college baseball is even lower than in the big leagues. According to a study by Boyd Nation (not scientific), only 5.3% of college baseball players in 2005 were black. Compare that with over 90 percent white.

It’s worth noting that college baseball scholarships are not the same as your typical athletic scholarship like football. Division-I baseball teams get around a dozen scholarships a year, and can spread them out over many more players than that if they choose. Most college baseball players still have to pay for some or all of their college tuition and expenses.

Because of this, it is often more difficult for a great high school baseball player from an inner city to continue to develop in college than his counterpart from a wealthy, suburban neighborhood. That often means that more white kids get to play college ball than black kids due to financial well being alone.

Is it really Major League Baseball’s fault that the number of black players is declining?

This is just a possible explanation for the decline in black players, but that is not the problem I have with the report.

There was one point that jumped out at me in the bullet points of this report that I couldn’t let just pass by. And I quote directly from the report:

Lou Piniella, in his first season as manager of the Chicago Cubs, led his team to the postseason for the first time in four years since Dusty Baker took them to the playoffs. Piniella is one of four Latino managers coaching in the MLB.

Lou Piniella is not a Latino manager. He was born in Tampa, Florida, to parents who were from the United States. Having your name end in a vowel, and not being Italian, does not make you Latino. I will not concede this point. Making a whole point about Piniella being a symbol of Latino success is unfair to Latinos, Piniella, and Major League Baseball. If you want to dissect the numbers, fine, but don’t try to twist the facts around to emphasize the results.

Inside the Numbers

The report went on to give grades for every aspect of MLB employment. Grades were given out based on the following criteria:

Federal affirmative action policies state that the workplace should reflect the percentage of the people in the racial group in the population. Thus, with approximately 24 percent of the population being people of color, an A was achieved if 24 percent of the positions were held by people of color, B if 12 percent of the positions were held by people of color, and C if it had only nine percent. Grades for race below this level were assigned a D for six percent or F for any percent equal to or below five percent.

For issues of gender, an A would be earned if 40 percent of the employees were women, B for 32 percent, C for 27 percent, D for 22 percent and F for anything below that. The 40 percent is also taken from the federal affirmative action standards. The Institute once again acknowledges that even those sports where grades are low generally have better records on race and gender than society as a whole.

Okay, two major problems with doing things this way. One, women don’t play baseball, thus are less likely to begin at a ground level and work their way up the corporate ladder. Their lack of experience in the game makes them far less qualified to land jobs that require knowledge of the game, such as scouting. Their inability to have a baseball background limits their ability to rise as effectively or quickly in executive positions. Not that there aren’t women qualified to hold many jobs in the game, but I think the game is being unfairly punished or criticized for hiring based on qualifications rather than quotas.

My other major problem with this report is that you can’t honestly expect the “workplace” to reflect the population in an instance like this. Of the 40.1% of the “people of color” in baseball, 29 percent of them are Latino, 8 percent black and 2 percent Asian. The problem I have with these numbers is that a large percentage of the Latino players in Major League Baseball don’t live in the United States full-time, and many don’t speak English well or even remain in the country after their careers are over. These are the people that are most qualified to move on to baseball jobs after playing, but for many reasons of their own, they don’t.

Hiring Latino’s just to make the numbers right is wrong. Hiring qualified individuals is right. Baseball is a sport and MLB is a league in which you need a baseball background in many positions. You can’t just hire people to fill a lot of these jobs.

More from the Associated Press:

Lapchick said 28 percent of employees at baseball’s central offices were nonwhite, including 20 percent among senior executives. Women were 42 percent of employees, but 26 percent of the senior executives.

He suggested baseball commissioner Bud Selig pressure clubs more to consider minority candidates. He also said MLB should institute a rule that a woman be considered for all senior job openings, similar to the rule that minority candidates must be interviewed.

I’m going to repeat that last part because it bears repeating. “He also said MLB should institute a rule that a woman be considered for all senior job openings, similar to the rule that minority candidates must be interviewed.” Do you really think that making MLB executives interview women and minorities is the right thing to do? I don’t mean right as in — make your numbers better — right. I mean right as in — allowing these companies to hire the most qualified individual, man or woman, black or white — and not based only on those “statistics.”

I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of affirmative action, but unfortunately, that’s what this report is all about.

I know this will sound sexist, and it probably is, but when a woman plays an inning in the big leagues, then someone can tell a Major League Baseball team that they have to interview a woman for their next senior job opening. It’s not about male or female, it’s about qualifications. If there are qualified females, they will be interviewed and hired when appropriate. Forcing teams to interview a “token” woman is as demeaning to the woman as it is to the team being told how to run their business.

Conclusion

There is no denying the numbers in this report. There is a reason to question the conclusion they’ve drawn. There are certainly less black players in the league than there once were. I recall sitting in the visiting dugout before an Arizona Diamondbacks game with Barry Bonds, and Bonds challenging me to name as many black players as I could. Between the two of us, we named maybe 20. That was a few years ago, and it was the first time I ever really realized just how few players eight percent encompassed. I don’t know what the solution is to this, or even if there is one. The only thing I took from that conversation was that the game was changing, and no one was really to blame.

Baseball has always changed with the times, and it’s always managed to not only keep up, but stay relevant and remain America’s Pastime. Getting the numbers where people want them is up to the sport, not the people in it. Baseball is a great game, and it’s up to the parents of each generation to introduce their children to it.

If baseball wants to make a difference, it needs to donate more fields and equipment to inner cities. They already do a great job of spreading the game, but if they focus on where they feel they need improvements they could make a big difference.

If racial evenness is what baseball wants, they can do their part to make it happen. But as long as there are so many options for kids to stay entertained, baseball will continue to lose American youths from the game, not just of one race.

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