At the tail end of the Fox Sports morning show “FSR at Daybreak”, Andy Furman and Artrell Hawkins got into a bitter argument over baseball that was turning racial and personal. [People here longer than 5 minutes know I care less about sports than Glenn Beck.]
The question came up “Why are there so few black men playing in professional baseball?”
The rate is down to 8.6%, less than the percentage of black men as a whole (13.6%)
Andy’s theory was that is wasn’t that blacks were being excluded from playing baseball, but rather that such a large percentage of black families are headed by women that there is no man around to toss the baseball back and forth and teach their sons how to play. Artell is black and a former NFL player. Both are from Cincinnati, a town not know for racial harmony to begin with. Artell took serious issue with the entire line of conversation and the pitch of his voice started going up. He didn’t argue that the lack of men heading families isn’t a fact, just that we don’t say things like that (especially if your skin is white). [Andy didn’t mention that about 1 million black men are locked away in prison or jails]
While an interesting theory, I don’t think that’s the explanation at all. The problem is there is no significant summer program for college age men, especially where most black men attend college. Baseball starts around April 1st and these days college ends typically in mid May. For a university to field a team that plays more than a few games, those students would have to attend summer school – many universities have only a skeleton staff in the summer, in part not wanting to incur the costs of air conditioning empty buildings, especially in the Southern US.
There are a few summer leagues – there is one up in Alaska that I’ve heard on streaming radio, but realistically there is no college summer baseball. If a college student plays for minor league baseball during the summer, he loses his amateur eligibility and his college baseball scholarship.
The result is that MLB has many players from the Caribbean – most notably the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I grew up admiring Roberto Clementeplaying for the Pirates, and when he spoke no English, which made for interesting “interviews” by Bob Prince, who usually gave up in frustration.
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/birthplace.php?y=2011
There has been a large decrease in players from those places which are predominantly black. A black man from the Dominican Republic will normally consider himself to be a Black Hispanic – not an “African American” just because he takes a job playing baseball here. MLB is about 2/3 “White” and 1/3 “Hispanic”.
The Caribbean countries talk freely and honestly about race, something we can’t handle. Had Andy said that MLB needs more blacks, he would be accused of expressing the stereotype that the only jobs black men can do are sports and entertainment. It’s a lose lose discussion. So we just avoid dealing with the fact that we are no more “one country” than we were before the Civil Rights movement. Even with a half black man as President and a black man on the Supreme Court, “Black Radio” is filled with phrases like “The White Man’s Law”, “Their Country”, “History is “His Story”, not ours”, “I’ve suffered from 400 years of slavery”
On Sunday mornings, when most “good” people are in church thanking God and expressing their love of Jesus, they do so in a voluntarily segregated church building.
When the Travon Martin case started, I stumbled on a poll being done on a Catholic web site and created a poll question about it
http://www.icatholicradio.com/poll-results/regarding-racial-tensions-revealed-by-the-death-of-treyvon-martin-the-church-can-best-help-healing-by.html
What struck me odd about their possible answers was the one
“Increased interaction between parishes populated predominantly by different races and ethnicities ”
which is a tacit endorsement of segregation – that you have “white parishes” and “Black Parishes” and “Hispanic Parishes” and it would just be a good thing if people from the various parishes played Bingo together.
I suspect if we polled African-American children, they would tell us that the “cool” sports are basketball and football. I doubt we would see many pick-up baseball games taking place. I suspect this would suffice to settle the heated brows as there is no program that I know of to force children to learn and play sports they don’t like or don’t have access to.
If I can dabble a bit into sports psychology (hey, it’s the internet – everyone is an expert!)… [and Mike Huckabee hasn’t outlawed free speech on the Internet yet]
In baseball, to win you have to throw the ball to the correct player on your team, not the one who has the same skin color as you. It requires the players to be colorblind about the race of the rest of the them, therefore it is a “white man’s sport”, not to mention being “gay”. [See George Carlin]
If blacks in large numbers are not Republicans, does that mean they are being excluded or does it just mean that blacks want to self-segregate?