League needs to continue to increase enrollment among Black players
Adam Jones was the exception.
Someone took an interest in him remaining a baseball player.
“It’s expensive to play baseball,” said Jones, who grew up in San Diego and played 14 seasons in the major leagues before spending last season and this one in Japan. “I had sponsors. I didn’t grow up with money. I had people … who saw the talent and said, ‘We want him on our team.’ To this day I don’t know who exactly paid for it. I’m extremely grateful.”
Tommy Pham shares the feeling.
“My coaches bought me stuff,” the Padres outfielder said. “Travel ball, a coach took care of me. I was lucky. … I was able to get help.”
The interest and investment allowed Pham and Jones, as young Black athletes, to grow in their love for and proficiency in a difficult and costly game to play.
Had that not happened, both men acknowledge they almost certainly would not have played baseball much, if at all, beyond childhood.
Whatever they ended up doing, it would have been something other than the sport that essentially requires participants to spend thousands of dollars on equipment, private coaches and travel with the club teams they have to join.
“It’s seeing somebody who looks like you,” said former major leaguer
Ryan Howard. “It’s having access to resources, having access to the same kind of facilities and coaching that will allow you to grow the game the way we need to. It’s incredibly expensive. … It’s a lot of money to play baseball.”
Speaking of that sort of access for many Black kids, Padres scout Chip Lawrence said, “The opportunity isn’t there. They can’t afford it.”
This is the reality confronting Major League Baseball as the league stages its annual Jackie Robinson Day.
On Thursday, every player on every team wore No. 42, the number worn by the player who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947.
Just less than eight percent of the players wearing those jerseys will be Black.
That is down from a high of 18.7 percent in 1981 and 17.2 percent as late as 1994. The total has not been as high as 10 percent since 2004, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
It would be difficult to argue that, with players from all over the world, MLB is not the most diverse of the United States’ major sports leagues. But it has devolved into something of a wasteland when it comes to luring Black athletes — or Black executives or field managers.
The reasons are deeper than simple neglect by MLB, though critics have said to some extent that has allowed the dearth of Blacks in the game to reach a point where the league is having to essentially create a grassroots campaign to get the Black community reengaged on a larger level.
“There are a number of reasons,” Tony Reagins,
MLB’S Chief Baseball Development Officer, said of the drop in participation in baseball by the Black community. “Access is one, cost is one. The family, the lack of the African-american male in the household and taking the child to ballgames and playing the game at a young age is a part of it. There’s not just one particular piece. Other sports and technology are options. I don’t think it’s just one particular area.”
There is a circular issue as well.
Black players also spoke about growing up watching Ken Griffey Jr., in particular.
“You see Lebron on TV, you see Steph Curry on TV,” Jones said. “You say, ‘I want to be him.’ There’s not many black players in baseball where you say, ‘I want to be like him.’ ”
Some of that, obviously, is the small number of Black players in the game. Some of it is the game itself.
“When you look at other sports, you see the way they market their players,” Pham said. “Black kids see that. They relate to that. They see what NFL and NBA guys are wearing to and from the stadium. It’s easy for a young black kid to get drawn into the NFL and NBA because it’s relatable. You seem them wearing the coolest outfits, you see them on commercials. You look at baseball, you don’t see any of that. Baseball is a little bit behind. Baseball is way behind, actually.”
Reagins, who is one of six Black men to have ever been the general manager of an MLB team (Angels from 2007-11), is spearheading the efforts by MLB to contribute resources in the Black community aimed at increasing participation and engagement, as well as educating young Black people about opportunities in baseball development and the business side of the game.
As he speaks of the history of baseball in the Black community and his own experiences growing up with the game, it is clear the endeavor is personal to Reagins.
“I grew up in a baseball household,” he said. “My grandparents, my mother, my brother. We were all engaged in baseball. When I think about it, my friends and their families were engaged in baseball. It was a community event. I think now what we see, baseball is still a part of the community, but there is a travel component that has chipped away from baseball and softball, for that matter.”
Reagins, 54, recalls it being $5 or $10 to play when he was in youth baseball. The proliferation of travel ball over the past 30 years and more recently of “showcase” events for scouts and college coaches, to the point where it is seen as practically necessary in order to advance in the game, has driven the annual cost of playing baseball at a high level for players as young as 10 years old to about 1,000 times what Reagins remembers.
Even at the local level, baseball requires more equipment and more commitment than basketball and football, which have become the preferred avenue to college and beyond for Black players.
“Baseball is a skill sport,” said Lawrence, the Padres’ national crosschecker.
“You can just go out on the basketball court and start shooting. Unfortunately, instruction has become more and more expensive. Baseball is a tough sport. It’s hard to make it, money or not. But getting kids the opportunity to have the ability, that’s where we lose a lot of folks — because they don’t have a lot of money and they’re not able to get the exposure or the instruction.”
Lawrence, who is Black, runs a program called the Pro Youth Foundation that holds clinics and tournaments for players from underserved communities and works with college coaches, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to connect them with players they might not otherwise see. And vice versa, letting players know they could have a future in baseball.
“They’re missing out on guys who could have a career in the game off the field as well as on the field,” Lawrence said of MLB. “We have to show kids who have a passion for the gam there is analytics, there is marketing. … I didn’t know what scouting is. Growing up, you don’t know about the opportunities.”