African American participation in Major League Baseball is at a 60-year low, and it’s unlikely that the numbers will increase any time soon. Here’s why.
Times change. They always do, even following hard-fought victories. Women’s choice, once secured through Roe v. Wade, is now under attack again. A once-vanquished disease–measles in 2002–is lurking nationwide. Public school segregation, which presumably ended with Brown vs. Board of Education, is very much back.
Things that ‘once were’ are here again. That same dynamic happens in sports, too. Baseball is an example. And baseball’s reversal is, well, just flat-out incredible.
Even though earlier generations of African Americans wanted to play in “the Big’s,” they were barred from participating until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The date was April 15, 1947, over 70 years ago.
Were he alive today, Robinson would find that baseball isn’t a game of choice among African Americans nationwide. Disinterest, not segregation, is the reason.
When The Undefeated analyzed MLB’s 2019 opening day rosters, it found two teams—the Colorado Rockies and San Diego Padres—that didn’t have a single African American player in their respective dugout. Another nine teams had only one African American player: the Diamondbacks (Phoenix), Tigers (Detroit), Dodgers (formerly Robinson’s team in Brooklyn, now situated in Los Angeles), Twins (Minneapolis-St. Paul), Mets (New York), Giants (San Francisco), Mariners (Seattle), Cardinals (St. Louis), and Nationals (Washington).
The head-shaking reality is that four of those cities are in America’s top ten when it comes to the size of the African American population.
When Jackie Robinson died in 1972, African Americans comprised about 16% of MLB baseball rosters. The percentage today—7.7%—is the lowest it has been since 1958.
The significant drop to African American baseball participation doesn’t seem possible. But before you blame MLB for not doing enough, understand that MLB has been active in attempts to encourage Black youth to play the game. Progress has been ploddingly slow. So what’s going on?
In a word, the problem is baseball, the game. Baseball is no longer “America’s Pastime.” Instead, baseball faces ‘a golf problem.” It’s slow, complicated, and costly.
Now, contrast that description to today’s urban American pastime, basketball. The cage game is fast, can be played intuitively, and doesn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg to play. What’s more, the pathway to the pros (whether or not a player goes through college) is more smoothly paved. Even the best baseball players rarely go directly to the Majors. Not so in basketball.
The NBA, not MLB, ranks highest among regular African-American TV viewers. In fact, percentage-wise more African Americans watch the NBA regularly than White viewers. And age-wise, the average age of all NBA viewers is 15 years younger than the average age of MLB viewers.
HBCU students (photo, HBCU Lifestyle)
The general abandonment of baseball by African Americans reaches down to the youth levels, including Little League and college baseball. The situation is evident even in a place that you wouldn’t expect–at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
HBCUs, both private and public, were established because higher education (at the time) was a whites-only institution. Howard University and Morehouse College are notable private HBCUs. Public HBCUs include South Carolina State and North Carolina A&T.
Today (as you would expect), African Americans represent the majority of students who attend HCBU’s nationwide. White student enrollment is about 20% of the overall HBCU student body. But the sports situation is different. While African Americans are well represented on HBCU basketball and football rosters, White players are a common denominator in baseball.
Here are two examples.
Courtesy: WVSU Athletics
The first is West Virginia State University, a public HBCU, founded in 1891. In baseball, 29 of the 30 players listed on the Yellow Jackets’ 2019 baseball roster are White.
One reason is shifting demographics. Other WV state universities are fully integrated today, and only about 4% of West Virginians are Black. Not surprisingly, then, the majority of WVSU students are White (about 75%), while fewer than 10% of WVSU students are Black. Still, though, White players are overrepresented on WVSU’s baseball team.
Bethune-Cookman University is a private HBCU located on Florida’s east coast. The overall student body remains predominately African American (around 80%), but that ratio doesn’t hold for Wildcats baseball. About half of the BCU roster is White.
The BCU story was picked up recently by reporter Billy Witz in an article published in The New York Times. The article’s title captures a dimension of baseball’s contemporary plight: “At Black Colleges, Teams Increasingly Aren’t.”
Witz went on to report NCAA data that–believe it or not–are worse than the MLB numbers. In 2018, African Americans represented only about 4% of all college baseball players nationally.
Is the problem unsolvable? The answer is probably, yes. Even though we live in a world where branding/marketing makes us believe that anybody can sell anything IF things are done right, baseball (fundamentally) has a cultural problem. It’s a cultural anachronism when it comes to contemporary American tastes, styles, and trends.
That doesn’t mean the game will go away, any more than golf will disappear. But it does mean that the game’s appeal will have to come in other ways. For example, minor league baseball attracts fans with food and lots of sidebar fun. It’s available at a reasonable price. And it’s available locally–often right in (or near) your hometown.
Nearly all of the NBA’s major stars are African American (photo, NBA.com)
Yes, fans, there was a day when African Americans couldn’t play MLB, even though Blacks really wanted to play. But restrictions were the rule (in varying degrees) in other pro leagues, too.
The difference today? African Americans are well represented in both the NFL (about 70%) and NBA (over 80%). In MLB, the participation rate is less than 8%.
Times do change, don’t they?
Great article and pointed out a ton of great historical facts. Great job tying in sports and the judicial system. I enjoyed this article very much!