Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
March 31, 2007
Civil Rights Game

It's been sixty years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and baseball kicks off the celebration with the first Civil Rights Game. The one place Bud Selig deserves unlimited praise is in his efforts to make the game more diverse. Once again, however, among American blacks, those efforts aren't paying off:

Major League Baseball began an effort to emphasize its place in the history of America's struggle for racial equality just one day after a study said only 8.4 percent of its players last season were black, the lowest level in at least two decades.

However, I thought this had been a steady decline since the height of black participation in the late 1960s. But that's not the case:

As recently as 1995, 19 percent of big leaguers were black, according to Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida 's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. Nine percent were black in both 2004 and 2005, and the current figure is the lowest since at least the mid-1980s, he said.

So is this just cyclical? What was MLB doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s to attract black Americans? Also, the report gives an overall good grade to MLB:

But Lapchick also acknowledged that the declining numbers of African-American players in the game remains a major concern. The study showed that 8.4 percent of players on 2006 rosters were African-American, and that's the smallest percentage since the report cards first were compiled in the mid-1980s.

"That has been a concern of Major League Baseball and leaders in the African-American community as the numbers have consistently gone down," Lapchick said. "On the other hand, with 40.5 percent players of color, MLB is close to its all-time high of 42 percent" set in 1997.

And that's a point worth making. People who care about the color of a player's skin don't care about where the player came from. Racists don't look at David Ortiz and say, "He's not black." So today let's celebrate the 40% of players on the field whose jobs Jackie Robinson made possible.


Posted by David Pinto at 08:50 AM | Demographics | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Isn't it slightly ironic that the "Civil Rights Game" includes a team called the Indians with a unflattering caricature of that ethnic group as their logo?


Posted by: Rich B at March 31, 2007 07:21 PM
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