Baseball isn’t losing out on black talent because of MLB’s choices, but because of the choices of young black athletes.
Ja’han Jones of MSNBC’s The ReidOut Blog argues that “MLB’s few Black players left should be a warning about the war on DEI”:
The league is reporting a historically low number of Black American players in its ranks: only 6%. I think this is a teachable moment at a time when diversity efforts across various arenas (no pun intended) have come under attack. Major League Baseball, unfortunately, is a prime example of what it looks like to talk the talk without always walking the walk . . . at a time when diversity programs have come under attack from right-wingers, MLB’s failure serves as a cautionary tale of what we stand to lose. Take education, for example. States that once had affirmative action policies designed to promote racial diversity on college campuses — such as California and Michigan — saw a decrease in the number of Black students after race-conscious admissions were banned. It’s a reminder and a warning that, in the absence of motivation, diversity measures almost always fall by the wayside.
Jones stretches so far as to claim, as an example of the problem, the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas — a city where non-Hispanic whites make up only 41.1 percent of the population.
Most conspicuously absent in Jones’s account is the largest driver of the decline of black Americans on Major League Baseball rosters: 29 percent of players in the league are foreign-born. The single largest category of those is players from the Dominican Republic, who by themselves make up 11 percent of the league. If you look around baseball and don’t notice an absence of black faces, it’s because there isn’t one. Baseball isn’t suffering from too little racial, ethnic, and national-origin diversity: counting international players, 29.6 percent of players are Hispanic/Latino (more than double the share in the late 1980s), and 3.4 percent are Asian. White American ballplayers, who made up in excess of 90 percent of the league until 1954, over 80 percent until 1963, and over 70 percent as recently as 1989, are now 60.5 percent. Nobody seems alarmed at that decline (nor should they be). The fact that Jones refuses to even mention the sharp rise in international players and Hispanic players and the decline in white players suggests how little interest he has in an honest discussion of the question.
Professional sports are relentlessly meritocratic, which is why it required discipline to keep the color line in place. Talent finds a way. John McGraw, for example, got caught on a few occasions trying to sneak black players onto his New York Giants rosters by claiming that they were Native American or some other non-excluded category. McGraw, a hard-drinking two-fisted Irishman who came of age in the 1890s, was no civil-rights activist; he was just a guy who’d do anything to win a baseball game and knew talent when he saw it. Baseball isn’t losing out on black talent because of MLB’s choices, but because of the choices of young black athletes.
If you look across the major team sports — even including the NHL, which remains almost exclusively white but also very heavily foreign-born — it’s hard to claim that black Americans are underrepresented in American professional athletics as a whole. Black players represent a majority of the NFL (as much as 70 percent according to some sources) and over 70 percent of NBA players, in a league where only 17.5 percent of the players are white. Black players are about a quarter of Major League Soccer, which is also about a third Hispanic and less than 40 percent white.
There have always been different mixes of athletes from different communities and cultures, and those trends are not static. To pick one extremely conspicuous example: Dominicans play baseball, and Haitians don’t. Two racially and economically similar populations, sharing the same Caribbean island, have very different presences in the world of baseball. There are 62 MLB players from Venezuela, but only seven from Colombia. MLB was dominated by Irish players in McGraw’s playing days; it’s not anymore.
Young, elite white athletes in America are likelier to focus on baseball than on football or basketball, and young, elite black athletes are likelier to focus on football or basketball than on baseball. Why is that? The economics of the sports and their player-development pipelines are clearly a big factor, and that will have downstream effects so long as black Americans are (on average) disproportionately more likely to be poor or working-class. Baseball is a more skill-based sport and less dependent upon athleticism, so it’s more important to start playing it in organized fashion at a younger age. Little League is expensive (in part because of travel and safety requirements for gear — poor kids in the Dominican get into baseball without the same resources). Pickup basketball is cheap, and is easy for kids in urban areas to play without access to large, green fields. High schools and colleges put more resources into football and basketball, which draw bigger crowds, bring in more money, and hand out more scholarships. Players who make the pro game then go straight to big leagues, rather than spend years as poorly paid minor league apprentices. All of these things make those sports more attractive to kids who want and need an immediate payoff. None of them are racial in origin.
None of that was true between the 1950s and 1960s, when the NFL and NBA were far less profitable and popular than baseball, and there were no Super Bowl, no Monday Night Football, and no televised NBA Draft, slam-dunk contest, or big sneaker contracts. Jackie Robinson himself was a big football and basketball star in college and had the natural build of a running back; if he was a young athlete today, he’d probably be in the NFL. Black American athletes are bypassing baseball in good part because they have more opportunities today, not fewer.
A study by Mark Armour and Dan Levitt for the Society for American Baseball Research’s Baseball Research Journal noted a third driver of the demographic shift in the game: the increasing number of roster spots taken up by pitchers. The innings thrown by a typical MLB pitcher have been in decline consistently since the 1880s, which means that teams must carry more pitchers and fewer position players. Black American athletes have always been less-represented among pitchers than among position players, and that continues to be the case long after the demise of old stereotypes that black athletes somehow lacked the brains to pitch or play quarterback. If there’s a disparity elephant in the room here — both in terms of perception and reality — it’s that across both baseball and football, white players tend to be disproportionately found at those positions (pitcher, catcher, quarterback, kicker, punter) that are the havens of athletes without exceptional foot speed. That likely happens because speed is one of the most visible skill that gets coaches and scouts salivating to deploy at the positions where it is most valuable. A black athlete with the arm to be a MLB pitcher — such as Patrick Mahomes, whose father pitched in the majors — but who also has outstanding speed is apt to be recruited to play quarterback. And what sports-mad American boy doesn’t want to be the quarterback on his high-school football team?
In short: Baseball has plenty of racial, ethnic, and national diversity, and the influx of international players is a big factor in why American-born players of all races take up fewer of its jobs; black American athletes are by no means underrepresented in American professional sports; and the game lacks for black American players in large part because they have more opportunities in other sports than they once did. If this is, as Jones claims, emblematic of the need for DEI in our society, that argues for a conclusion that is quite the opposite of the one he would like.