Baseball's Black Decline
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BASEBALL'S MAJOR BLACK LEAGUE DECLINE BASEBALL'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 Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in the 1940’s, participation of Black athletes is at levels of when he retired in the late 50’s. Major League Baseball is largely responsible for this through a combination of financial 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 United States. 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 office 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 scientific racist beliefs that suggest certain races are better for specific roles. This leads to players being funneled into certain positions then canibalizing each other for playing time. So scouts and front offices 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 profitable business now but if it continues down the path of being for affluent 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 benefit 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 influence an individual’s self-identity based on factors such as family and peer influence, 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 basketball 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 fixture 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 Barry Bonds 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 financial 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 field. 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 financial 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 financially 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, chiefly the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities) program, the Hank Aaron Invitational, and the Breakout Series. According to the MLB front office, they have spent $30 million since the RBI program’s creation in 1989 on resources such as building/maintaining fields for kids to play on and equipment to use as well as giving away scholarships to assist 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 Little League baseball $76 for 8 years simply for the rights to broadcast the Little League World Series (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 single 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.