LOCAL PIPELINE TO THE MAJORS
Baby boomers who grew up playing and loving baseball had among their heroes Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams, Ernie Banks, Bob Gibson, Willie Stargell, Joe Morgan and Reggie Jackson — Black players all.
Today, only 6.1% of players on opening-day rosters of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams were Black, the smallest percentage in the league since 1955, which was eight years after Jackie Robinson shattered the league’s color line. The highest percentage of Blacks reached in MLB history was 18.7% in 1981.
At the start of this season, as Bob Nightengale wrote in USA Today earlier this year, five teams didn’t have a single Black player, and nine teams had just one.
The Atlanta Braves, for whom Aaron played and on which team he broke baseball’s all-time home run record in 1974, have one Black player, Michael Harris II, who grew up in the Atlanta area and was last year’s National League Rookie of the Year.
Pundits have expressed various opinions as to why this dearth has occurred in what came to be known as America’s Pastime, and we’ll talk about a few of those. But what prompted this subject was a blurb in Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly’s recent weekly newsletter, in which he mentioned he had thrown out the first pitch for Chattanooga’s season of Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI).
The program, which began in 1989 and has been administered by Major League Baseball since 1991, has been offered for youth in Chattanooga since 2013.
Its mission — among other things — is to increase participation and interest in baseball and softball among underserved youth, promote greater inclusion of youth with diverse backgrounds into the mainstream of the game and increase the number of talented athletes prepared to play in college and professionally.
Obviously, RBI leagues across the country also would like to increase the number of “underserved” and “diverse” players in MLB, and to date their success stories have included former New York Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia, former Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins, and former Atlanta Braves players B.J. Upton and Justin Upton.
The program, for ages 13-18, is under the direction of Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors, which also sponsors baseball and softball leagues for boys and girls ages 3-19.
Since the league’s local inception, more than 700 youth have participated. Among its teams, the 2014 and 2016 boys senior baseball and girls softball squads advanced to their respective Southeast Regional Championship games, and the 2016 boys senior team won the regional tournament and advanced to the RBI World Series in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Scouts for MLB teams are likely to see or hear about stars in the league from events such as the USA Baseball Tournament of Stars in June and the RBI World Series in August.
However, RBI is only one of several diversity-focused programs with which MLB is affiliated.
As to why Major League Baseball experienced such a drop in Black players, among the reasons cited are the heightened popularity of the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, the high school attention of fans, cheerleaders and bands to football and to a lesser extent basketball (but usually not to baseball), the expense of travel baseball (where the better players may be exposed to college coaches and professional baseball representatives), the ease in practicing basketball (which can be done alone), MLB’s economic ease in culling Latin American players, and a certain ability for football and basketball players to transcend the game and become stars in the culture (think Michael Jordan) that rarely happens in baseball.
“I didn’t even think Black people played baseball until I got out of St. Louis and went down South,’’ All-Star closer Devin Williams of the Milwaukee Brewers told Nightengale. “Those kids all played baseball and football. In St. Louis, it was all basketball and football. The select leagues I was in, I never saw any Black kids.”
To Williams’ point, the only Chattanooga-born Black MLB player we could find was Leon “Daddy Wags” Wagner, who did not grow up here but played in the majors from 1958 to 1969.
However, Chattanooga-born Black players Anthony Roberts, Malcolm Mackey and Johnny Taylor all played in the NBA within the last 50 years — Taylor as recently as 2000.
And as to the NFL, around 20 Black players born in Chattanooga have made it within the last 50 years. In fact, according to Pro Football Reference, the last 17 NFL players born here were Black. The last white Chattanooga product to make it to the NFL was Brent Johnson in 1987.
Only about one in 200 high school baseball players will reach the majors, but with a minimum salary of $720,000 this year and an average salary of $4.9 million at the beginning of the 2023 season — up 11.1% — it’s something to shoot for. And that $4.9 million would put such an athlete behind the salaries of only three CEOs in Chattanooga, according to an article in this newspaper earlier this month.
We hope one day in the near future, a major league star will be able to look back and remember how he got his start in the city’s MLB-affiliated RBI program.