BASEBALL'S MAJOR BLACK LEAGUE DECLINE 'S ROLE IN TURNING BASEBALL WHITE

Nathan Clark Executive Summary

Major League Baseball is America’s pastime and yet for decades the sport is becoming increasingly devoid of African American players. While the sport is famous for breaking the color barrier in the 1940’s, participation of Black athletes is at levels of when he retired in the late 50’s. is largely responsible for this through a combination of fnancial failings for the Black community, alienating Black fans and players creating a negative feedback loop of disinterest by African American youth, and replacing African American diversity with Latino players from Latin American countries that they can pay a fraction of what they would have to pay players from the .

The MLB is an organization mostly owned and operated by rich old White men but they need to recognize the failures of the league to keep the Black commmunity involved with the sport. Decisions from the MLB front offce affect not only the league but the sport as a whole. Major League Baseball needs to perform three critical actions if they want to reinvigorate a love for the game with African Americans:

1. Pay Minor Leaguers a livable wage: Minor League players are given a poverty wage which acts as a deterrent for many young athletes who can’t afford to slog through the minors for a few years before even potentially making the major leagues. 2. Market Black Stars Major League Baseball is sitting on a slew of Black Superstars that would excite and inspire the next generation yet the league doesnn’t capitalize on them. Don’t let the incoming group of young Black stars go to waste as well. 3. Stop Positional Stacking Major League Baseball has an issue where players are often urged into certain positions by scouts and coaches based on scientifc racist beliefs that suggest certain races are better for specifc roles. This leads to players being funneled into certain positions then canibalizing each other for playing time. So scouts and front offces need to be informed that these biases are unfounded and let players play whatever they feel most comfortable with.

Major League Baseball needs to shift its mentality for the longterm health of the game. Baseball is a proftable business now but if it continues down the path of being for affuent Whites, the game will be a hollow shell of what it once was. Problem Statement

African American presence in Major League Baseball has seen a steady decline for the past 30+ years along with a decline of African American participation in baseball as a whole. Major League Baseball as an institution has made attempts at increasing these numbers with varying degrees of success, yet the MLB must improve these numbers to beneft both baseball as a community and keep America’s pastime alive within Black culture. Major League Baseball as an organization may not directly be responsible for every form of youth baseball in the U.S. but it directly impacts both the potential talent entering the league and the size/demographics of the fanbase.

Figure 1 Background

Baseball and Black Culture

Although Jackie Robinson is a hero in both baseball and Black history, baseball has felt a waning presence in the Black community. Gidden’s structure theory suggests that there is a web of structures in place that infuence an individual’s self-identity based on factors such as family and peer infuence, economics, cultural identity, and general social environment (Ogden & Rose, 2005). For the Black community, that means there is a stronger pressure to play sports like or football than there is to play baseball. Black parents push their kids to play basketball instead of baseball. The overwhelming majority of the NBA is black and their stars are black. Basketball is a prominent fxture of hip-hop. In short, basketball is a “black sport” and baseball isn’t. This only creates a negative feedback loop for baseball. The more kids get pushed away from the sport gets. The whiter the sport gets, the more kids get pushed away from it. But how much of this is Major League Baseball’s fault?

An analysis of MLB footage featuring spectators found that 2% of shots focused on a purely Black crowd, 12% of shots focused on a racially mixed audience, and 85% of shots focused exclusively on White spectators (Ogden & Rose, 2005). Major League Baseball is perpetuating the message that the audience for baseball is White. Major League Baseball is also having a star problem. Once disgraced his legacy and the reputation of baseball, superstars in baseball haven’t been as widely known as their football or basketball counterparts. Black children look up to LeBron James or Steph Curry while their peers in baseball are largely unknown by comparison. But when it comes to the Black community and playing baseball, the biggest issue may not be gatekeeping culturally, it may be the fnancial burdens associated with it. The Cost of Playing Baseball

The cost of youth sports has seen a dramatic increase over time leading to certain sports being more accessible than others. A 2019 study conducted by the Aspen Institute found the average cost of youth sports per child/per year and found that baseball costs on average $660 to participate in, approximately $200 more than sports like basketball or football and $450 more than track and feld. That’s before looking at travel teams, teams that travel around the country participating in various events and giving their players more opportunities to be seen by scouts. Those teams are around $3,700 per year to participate in (Smith, 2017). African Americans are simply getting priced out of baseball.

African American households make $20,000 less than their white counterparts which in turn gives Black children fewer athletic opportunities. While participation in youth sports is on a decline nationally, this fnancial barrier disproportionately affects people of color. And that’s on the lowest levels of youth sports, these barriers exist at every level from tee-ball to the minor leagues. Most college baseball players aren’t on a full-ride scholarship like their basketball or football peers. Instead, they are on a partial scholarship that varies in how much it helps pay for tuition. This both incentivizes young athletes with college aspirations to pursue another sport when it comes to deciding what to focus on and it prevents players from potentially going to college to pursue baseball if it’s not a fnancially viable option.

Major League Baseball can realistically do so much. It has no power over the NCAA to control who gets scholarships, they can’t go to every Little League team in the country and place mandates on fees, but have they acknowledged this problem and attempted to solve it in any way? Major League Diversity Programs

Major League Baseball has a handful of programs dedicated to increasing Black diversity in baseball, chiefy the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities) program, the Invitational, and the Breakout Series. According to the MLB front offce, they have spent $30 million since the RBI program’s creation in 1989 on resources such as building/maintaining felds for kids to play on and equipment to use as well as giving away scholarships to alumni of the program.

Major League Baseball’s aforementioned comments were released in 2018, 29 years after the program started meaning that $30 spent is almost $3 million a year on average. The number begins to look smaller when you consider they operate in hundreds of cities with hundreds of thousands of participants. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth but ESPN paid $76 for 8 years simply for the rights to broadcast the Little League (Peter, 2014). Major League Baseball is a multibillion-dollar industry and yet they spend less on average on their biggest diversity-based program than a team would spend on a middle reliever. Focus on foreign talent

The decrease of African American talent in Major League Baseball coincides with the explosion of Latino players and while not a direct cause-and-effect, there is a correlation between these statistics. But it’s more than a matter of ethnicity, there’s no inherent bias for athletes of Hispanic origins to be more drawn to baseball by birth. Instead, the issue is the country of origin, Latin American countries have increased their presence in Major League Baseball dramatically over the past few decades.

Looking at 2021 MLB players by their country of origin, we see that American-born players are still the overwhelming majority but players from Puerto Rico and Latin American countries such as Venezuela and the Dominican Republic make up ~23% of major league rosters. The Dominican Republic alone outnumbers African American players 10% to 7.5%. This is interesting when you consider the fact that the population of the DR is approximately 10.4 million and approximately 46.8 million Americans identify as African American either entirely or partially. So how is that a country with a quarter of the population that there are African Americans outnumbers Black athletes at the major league level? Of course, other sports such as basketball and football competing with baseball are a factor, but arguably the largest contributor is the number of resources invested by MLB teams in developing Latino talent compared to their African American peers.

Each of the 30 MLB teams has a baseball academy located in the Dominican Republic available for young athletes as young as 15.5 years old. These teenage athletes typically either drop out of school or begin going part-time with baseball becoming their main focus. The age at which players can focus full time on improving their craft isn’t the only trait that makes them enticing to American teams, they also canchooseto negotiate with players on an individual basis versus the draft system in place in the U.S. and have historically paid Dominican players a fraction of what they would their American counterparts. Recommendations

Increase Minor League Salaries

Unlike other major American professional sports leagues, Major League Baseball has a robust minor league system where athletes generally start at a designated Rookie League and make their way through the Class A, Low A, High A, -A, and -A leagues before their shot at the majors. This also means that they have to work their way through multiple leagues, a process that often takes a few years, before earning the luxurious major league salary fans come to expect. ’s salary issues are quite severe as the minor league minimum salaries for each league are well below the poverty line where they’re living.

These salaries lead to players having a handful of options to afford their dreams: ● They were highly drafted so they signed a large enough signing bonus to comfortably afford. For example, Spencer Torkelson, the frst player selected in the 2020 MLB Draft, signed an $8.4 million signing bonus with the Detroit Tigers (Synder, 2020) ● They have multiple jobs besides baseball. Randy Dobnak, a for the , famously was an Uber and Lyft driver during his time in the minors ( ● Their family can afford to support them during their time in the minors

This is where POC are disproportionately put in a diffcult position. According to US Census data, in 2019 white households made ~20 thousand dollars more than Hispanic households and ~30 thousand more than African American households. This means that white families on average are more likely to be in a position to help support their sons fnancially than their Black or Hispanic peers. From 1981-2010, only 17.6% of players who were drafted and signed made it to the major league level. That leaves hundreds of others making a fraction of what their superstar counterparts make in a year over their entire career. In a league that earns billions of dollars in revenue each year, the MLB front offce should force team owners to pay players in their minor league systems a livable wage.

When young black athletes are looking into professional opportunities and they see minor league baseball, it acts as a deterrent. If kids are multi-sport athletes and they have to make a choice at a certain age as to what sport to focus on in order to potentially go pro, the MLB is shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to pay minor leaguers a wage that pays less than going to college and getting a more traditional job. Market Black Stars

Major League Baseball needs to market their star African American athletes. is an MVP playing for the LA Dodgers and has won two world series rings. The 2020 MLB and Rookie of the Year award winners were African American. Yet their name recognition pales in comparison to the likes of LaMelo Ball and Anthony Edwards of the NBA or and Kyler Murray of the NFL. Black kids today don’t grow up idolizing baseball players like kids in the 90’s idolized Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds or kids in the 80’s with and . The combination of the NBA completely taking over Black communities thanks to and the backlash of the early 2000s steroid scandal in the MLB has left baseball’s biggest stars unknown outside of the fans of the game.

Major League Baseball needs to improve its image by taking advantage of its top talent. Mookie Betts, Andrew McCutchen, , , , the list of Black stars who have been MVP winners or candidates in recent years is long but perhaps the only one who broke into mainstream relevance in any way was Judge in 2016 when he went viral for hitting towering homeruns, standing 6’7”, and having the last name Judge which people found entertaining.

Baseball is spoiled with up and coming Black talent. of the Reds, Devin Williams of the Brewers, of the Angels, of the Mariners, and Ke’Bryan Hayes of the Pirates are all exciting top prospects that the league should welcome with open arms. At the same time, get rid of the “unwritten rules” of baseball which punish players for celebrating big moments such as retaliating a homerun batfip with intentionally throwing at a player. In basketball kids love celebrating a dunk or a big shot, in football they love celebrating a touchdown. Let kids enjoy the game of baseball without archaic rules telling them to be “professionals”. You can be a good sport and still be passionate about the game that you love. Eliminate Positional Stacking

Stacking, or positional segregation, is a phenomenon in sports in which athletes are funneled into specifc positions based on ethnicity. A well-known form of this outside of baseball is in the NFL where African Americans are more likely to play wide receiver or defensive end while quarterbacks and kickers are almost entirely white. In baseball, African Americans are encouraged to mostly play the outfeld positions. A signifcant portion behind the reasoning for this is based on racist beliefs that certain races are genetically better for certain positions. African Americans were perceived as having “God-given” athleticism and speed while white athletes overcame these differences by being more intelligent and harder working (Denham, 2020). The most problematic position in baseball is the where there hasn’t been a black everyday catcher in the MLB since Charles Johnson retired in 2005 (Jeter, 2020). 16 years without a black starter for a single position is unacceptable but this is likely caused by youth usually being A. one of the slower kids on the team as they won’t be a liability defensively and B. smart enough to be the feld , traits that aren’t often attributed to black kids.

Major League Baseball needs to actively dispel any ideas that certain races are a better ft for different positions as all it does is perpetuate archaic stereotypes, gatekeep children from exploring and having fun with the sport, and causes African Americans to compete for limited spots on a team by pigeonholing them into three outfeld slots. This is a problem that is complex to solve and can’t be fxed overnight but the MLB front offce should instruct teams and scouts to get some form of racial bias training and allow players the opportunity in the minors to try a multitude of positions outside of what they “should” play. Former MVP Mookie Betts was originally a before the Red Sox organization felt he would be a better ft as a right felder. He would go on to win multiple gold gloves and become one of the best defenders in the game, but did the Red Sox rob baseball of potentially the best African American infelder in generations and a possible inspiration for Black children by doing so? It’s impossible to tell, but Major League Baseball needs to put a stop to stacking. The more talent is ethnically diverse at the highest level, it will trickle down to youth leagues. Figure 5 WORKS CITED

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Snyder, M. (2020, July 1). Tigers ink No. 1 MLB Draft pick Spencer Torkelson to record signing bonus, per report. CBSSports.com. https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/tigers-ink-no-1-mlb-draft-pick-spencer-torkel son-to-record-signing-bonus-per-report/#:~:text=The%20Detroit%20Tigers%20hav e%20agreed,com%2C%20is%20a%20record%20%248%2C416%2C300. Figure Resources

Figure 1 - Sports Illlustrated Black Experience Cover via https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/07/17/preston-wilson-baseball-black-lives-matter

Figure 2 - Cover Jordan via https://vault.si.com/vault/1994/03/14/err-jordan-try-as-he-might-michael-jordan -has-found-baseball-beyong-his-grasp

Figure 3 - MLB RBI via https://www.mlb.com/rbi

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Figure 5 - USA Today Sports Chart via https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2020/0 8/14/mlb-black-players-signs-of-growth-100th-anniversary-negro-leagues/3366 480001/