Participation drops:
Efforts to boost participation falling short
70th anniversary of Robinson’s historic breakthrough also brings baseball’s declining African-American numbers into spotlight.
It is unlikely that today’s Jackie Robinson would have made his living in baseball.
His best sport was football, and today’s prep football players are year-round warriors. He might have dabbled in other sports at Muir High in Pasadena, Calif., but he would have spent his summers in 7-on-7 drills and in the weight room.
He might still have attended UCLA, but he would have been discouraged from pursuing track and field, baseball or tennis, lest they interfere with spring practice.
Football would have provided Robinson with his full scholarship ride. Baseball offers 11.7 scholarships in Division I, hardly enough to accommodate the players required. Given that choice, Robinson would have stuck with football with all roads leading to the NFL.
As it was, the real Jackie Robinson was playing semipro football with the Honolulu Bears in 1941, for $100 a game. His ship, the Lurline, was returning to Los Angeles on Dec. 7 when the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived. According to Arnold Ramparsad’s biography of Robinson, the ship’s windows were blacked out and it sailed at night to avoid detection.
When the Army discharged Robinson in 1944, he played semipro football for the L.A. Bulldogs and then became the athletics director at Sam Huston College in Austin.
No American professional sport was quite to the point of integration. Robinson played baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. He disliked it because of the showmanship and the unreliable compensation.
That’s when Branch Rickey dispatched his Brooklyn Dodgers scouts, working separately without knowledge of each other, to find the right African-American player to cross a color line that seemed indelible.
They recommended Robinson, and Rickey met him, read him Scripture, quoted Gandhi and tried to preview all the racial insults Robinson would hear. When he became convinced that Robinson was tough enough to subvert his own yearning for retaliation, Rickey signed him, and now Robinson’s No. 42 is retired throughout Major League Baseball.
The signing happened Aug. 28, 1945. Robinson’s UCLA football teammate, Kenny Washington, signed with the Los Angeles Rams six months later, breaking the NFL’s color line for good.
So there were many points at which someone else could have become the solitary pioneer, not Robinson.
Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber once said that Robinson, Babe Ruth and players association head Marvin Miller were the three men who changed baseball more than any other. (Only Robinson and Ruth are in the Hall of Fame.)
But if Robinson were alive today, he might question the durability of that change.
A PRECIPITOUS DROP
Only eight of every 100 players in MLB are African-Americans. In 1975, it was 19 of every 100.
In the most recent survey by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only 3% of Division I college baseball rosters were black, as were 7.1% of head coaches.
The scholarship pinch in college means that most multisport athletes in high school will gravitate toward football or basketball unless they’re good enough to be picked high in the MLB draft and thus command large bonuses.
Hunter Greene of Notre Dame High in Sherman Oaks, Calif., who is black, is a pitcher-slugger who is expected to lead off the 2017 draft. But there were only five African Americans taken in the first 10 picks of the three prior drafts, and only Corey Ray (Louisville) was a collegian.
The baseball scholarship limit of 11.7 averages out to 1.30 scholarship players per starting position. The 85-scholarship limit in football averages out to 3.86 such players per starting position.
As espn W and others have pointed out, these are limits imposed by the NCAA in response to Title IX guidelines, not by Title IX officials themselves. The government is not telling the NCAA to allow 20 scholarships in women’s rowing. That is the NCAA’s response to the demand for equivalence.
The business of baseball, constructed on attendance and television ratings and social media clicks, would indicate the game is not suffering without African Americans. The product itself assuredly is.
In 2016, only two African Americans, Mookie Betts and Dexter Fowler, were among the top 40 major league hitters in on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS). Only two African-American pitchers, David Price and Chris Archer, were among the top 40 in WHIP (walks and hits allowed per inning pitched).
The contrast with 1975 is staggering. That year, 11 of the top 20 OPS leaders were African American. Joe Morgan was first, John Mayberry third, Dave Parker seventh, Willie Stargell eighth and Bobby Bonds 10th. Three of the top 40 WHIP pitchers were black.
Stargell and Parker injured their knees while playing football as kids. Parker was a 14th-round draft pick in baseball, and Stargell
signed for $1,500. In his Society for American Baseball Research biography, Stargell is quoted as saying baseball was “all we had” growing up, in his neighborhood fields in Orlando and, later, Alameda, Calif.
Today, with advances in knee rehab, maybe both would have become linebackers or tight ends, and most of those neighborhood fields are long gone.
“It’s long past time we did something about this,” says Fred Claire, general manager of the Dodgers from 1987 to 1998. “There have been great programs, like RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities), but it hasn’t been enough. Some of the African Americans in the major leagues need to spread the word. This is a great game, and it doesn’t have a lot of the disabling injury risks that football and others have.”
SCOUTING DEFICIENCY
Baseball has seen a proliferation of Caribbean players who, outside of Puerto Rico, are taken outside the MLB draft and can be signed at 17. Twenty percent of players on 2016 opening-day rosters were from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
Most major league teams devote millions to scouting and instruction in the Caribbean. They don’t address the same needs in Chicago or Los Angeles.
Every April 15, MLB teams celebrate the anniversary of Robinson’s debut, and all players wear No. 42. But 2017 also is the 30th anniversary of the firing of Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, in a moment that focused more attention on racial issues in baseball than anything before or since.
It was April 6, 1987, opening day in Houston. The Dodgers lost to the Astros, and Campanis was interviewed by ABC’s Ted Koppel on Nightline. When Koppel asked why MLB had no black managers, Campanis said they perhaps lacked “the necessities.” Later in the tortured interview, he cited that African Americans didn’t have “the buoyancy” to become competitive swimmers, even though Robinson dabbled in swimming at Muir.
Campanis, 70 at the time, resigned two days later. Don Newcombe, the African-American pitching star for the Dodgers, defended Campanis who, after all, had been Robinson’s double-play partner with the Montreal Royals. Campanis mentored Robinson on and off the field and ministered to him after he was knocked cold in a spring training collision with Bruce Edwards that some thought was intentional.
“Al did not have a racist bone in his body,” says Claire, who succeeded Campanis but, at the time, was the club’s communications vice president. “I wish I had been there when that happened. All he was doing was trying to defend his profession.”
In last year’s National League Division Series, Dusty Baker (Washington Nationals) and Dave Roberts (Dodgers) became the first black managers to oppose each other in the postseason. But when the Seattle Mariners fired Lloyd McClendon after the 2015 season, there was a short period when MLB had no black managers.
It took foresight and courage to bring Robinson into baseball, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education and 17 before the Civil Rights Act.
The forces that are bleeding that heritage out of baseball are less sinister and systematic and, thus, tougher to overcome.