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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [People here longer than 5 minutes know I care less about sports than Glenn Beck.]<\/p>\n
The question came up “Why are there so few black men playing in professional baseball?”<\/p>\n
http:\/\/hardballtalk.nbcsports.com\/2011\/04\/21\/the-percentage-of-u-s-born-blacks-in-baseball-drops-again\/<\/a><\/p>\n The rate is down to 8.6%, less than the percentage of black men as a whole (13.6%<\/a>)<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Artell is black and a former NFL player.\u00a0 Both are from Cincinnati, a town not know for racial harmony to begin with.\u00a0\u00a0 Artell took serious issue with the entire line of conversation and the pitch of his voice started going up.\u00a0\u00a0 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).\u00a0\u00a0 [Andy didn’t mention that about 1 million black men are locked away in prison or jails]<\/p>\n While an interesting theory, I don’t think that’s the explanation at all.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The problem is there is no significant summer program for college age men, especially where most black men attend college.\u00a0 Baseball starts around April 1st and these days college ends typically in mid May.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 If a college student plays for minor league baseball during the summer, he loses his amateur eligibility and his college baseball scholarship.<\/p>\n The result is that MLB has many players from the Caribbean – most notably the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and Puerto Rico.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.baseball-almanac.com\/players\/birthplace.php?y=2011<\/p>\n There has been a large decrease in players from those places which are predominantly black.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 MLB is about 2\/3 “White” and 1\/3 “Hispanic”.<\/p>\n The Caribbean countries talk freely and honestly about race, something we can’t handle.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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. \u00a0 It’s a lose lose discussion. \u00a0\u00a0 So we just avoid dealing with the fact that we are no more “one country” than we were before the Civil Rights movement. \u00a0 \u00a0 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”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.icatholicradio.com\/poll-results\/regarding-racial-tensions-revealed-by-the-death-of-treyvon-martin-the-church-can-best-help-healing-by.html<\/p>\n What struck me odd about their possible answers was the one<\/p>\n “Increased interaction between parishes populated predominantly by different races and ethnicities ”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [People here longer than 5 minutes know I care … Continue reading