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.

There's a number of stories that get printed every year around this time. There's the marginal ballplayer getting one last shot at the majors. The pitcher developing a new pitch. The player with some corrective surgery that changed his life. Today we get the story about the lack of African Americans in the game. This one is a bit different, as for the first time no one is blaming baseball for being racist. C.C. Sabathia seems to understand the situation very well:

Sabathia thinks another reason for baseball's dip in popularity among urban youth could be traced to the lure of big-money contracts in other sports.

"Black kids see LeBron (James) coming out of high school and getting his millions," the 26-year-old said. "So they see basketball and football as the quickest way out. But they don't realize I got to the big leagues when I was only 20."

However, the line that got me was this:

"That's amazing. That's unbelievable," he said. "I don't think people understand that there is a problem. They see players like Jose Reyes and Carlos Delgado and just assume that they're black."

I always assumed they were Australian aborigines. :-) Of course, another way of looking at this issue is what percentage of major leaguers wouldn't be playing today if Jackie Robinson hadn't broken the color barrier. Jackie didn't just break it for blacks. He broke it for assumed blacks, too.

Now, let's get serious and look at the research:

According to a 2005 report by the University of Central Florida Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only 8.5 percent of major leaguers were African American - the lowest percentage since the report was initiated in the mid-1980s. By contrast, whites comprised 59.5 percent of the majors' player pool, Latinos 28.7 percent and Asians 2.5.

I assume here that Latinos are both white and black Latinos, so the 59.5% of whites are white Americans. That means of the US born players on major league rosters, African Americans make up 12.4%. According to the census, if you look at the population of white only and black only, the percentage is 16.4%. So indeed, African Americans are underrepresented in major league baseball.

I don't pretend to know what to do about this problem, or even if this is really a problem. Baseball is open to more people of varied backgrounds than ever before. The one place where I'll praise Bud Selig without reservation is in his efforts to bring minorities into the game. It may just be the natural cycle of things. Different ethnic groups dominated the game over time, then waned away. In 20 years we might be asking, "What happened to all the Latino players?"

I'm glad people are both talking about this and actually trying to fix it. For the good of the game, I'd like to see as many people interested in baseball as possible. So if stories like this help in that regard, I'll read them once a year.

Major League Baseball is taking concrete steps to bring inner city children back to the game.

Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig cut the ceremonial ribbon Tuesday on the league's first Urban Youth Academy, aimed at increasing interest in the sport among inner-city children.

For all the criticism I've given Bud Selig over the years, he's been the best commissioner ever in terms of trying to diversify call areas of the game. And Arte Moreno steps to the plate again:

"The first step is to get these kids interested in baseball, and the next step is getting them to college," said Moreno, who pledged $500,000 in scholarship money over the next five years to academy participants.

I suspect this is just the first of many such centers. Even if they don't change the demographics of baseball players, they'll help produce new fans, which is good for the long term health of the game.

Baseball Musings is conducting a pledge drive in March. Click here for details.

I'm keeping track of the Dernell Stenson case using Google news alerts. Today, I got one, but it was about an interesting web site run by Frank Russo called TheDeadBallEra.com. Frank tracks the deaths of major leaguers. He has links to obituaries, photos of graves, deaths by category, everything you want to know about your favorite dead pull hitter. Check it out.

Beyond the Score has an interesting post on the Devil Rays capturing young Japanese fans by holding clinics for children on their far eastern trip.

Bruce Markusen, the manager of museum programs for the Baseball Hall of Fame recently sat down to interview Mudcat Grand and Al Oliver about the decline of African Americans playing the game today. He saw this post and thought I would be interested in a copy of the interview. He's allowed me to reprint the transcript here. It's a great read, full of history and humor. I love this passage:

Markusen: Mudcat, your thoughts on RBI?

Grant: I’m really disappointed in the RBI program. The intention of it was to promote baseball in the inner city. It hasn’t gotten very much promotion. And on top of that, for some reason, they will not use ex-African American ballplayers. We beg to be used. We’re not called for certain events; we’re not called for certain tournaments. I think if they use us more, the program will improve. I think right now it may be a semi-political thing. As long as baseball promotes the word ‘RBI,’ it would seem [in their minds] to be OK, but nothing is really happening in the inner city communities when it comes to RBI. We have to get the cities involved where the ballfields are, where the RBI players play. Take care of the field a little bit. You know, run that machine over there. Don’t let [the field] get so bad that the kids don’t want to play. So we have to get the cities involved; they’ve been ignoring where the inner city kids play.

But I’m more disappointed in the head of the RBI program because we don’t make a point [of getting former black players involved]. I think we are afraid to say that this is definitely an inner city program. Say it. And then do it. And then when you do the program, bring white kids in, too. Let them mix. Let them do things. But first do the job that the RBI program is supposed to do. It’s an inner city program; get these kids playing baseball. Call us, so we can motivate parents to be managers and so forth.

Oliver: Mudcat just hit on one key point when he said ‘inner city,’ but let’s bring in whites. Today’s society, in the inner city, you see whites as well. And what better way can we learn about each other. See, that’s where we need to be at in 2004. This is not 1804. We should be like this now. What better way to bring people together to learn about each other, and find out that, hey, we are all in this together.

One other comment I'd like to make on this issue, and a tip of the hat to my wife Marilyn for suggesting it. Baseball has always been a game of shifting demographics. In the Bill James Historical Abstract (First Edition), James talks about who played the game in each decade. Different ethnic groups dominate various eras, then fade away. It could be that is what is happening to US blacks in baseball. Like other groups before them, as they grow more affluent, a risky career in sports becomes less of a draw.

The problem, of course, is that baseball has a history of segregation that makes people very wary of these types of trends. To his credit, Bud Selig does recognize this particular problem and at least makes an effort to confront it. I hope he will take the advice of these two veterans to improve the system.

Doug Pappas links to this article about the major league's concern with the declining number of African-American players.

Whatever the causes, Major League Baseball is treating the trend seriously, as a crisis of culture, if not relevancy. After all, what does it say about America's oldest, most tradition-rich professional sport that the best athletes from an entire segment of the American population have little more than a marginal stake, or passing interest, in it?

"When you think of the heritage of Jackie Robinson and (Larry) Doby and (Roy) Campanella and (Hank) Aaron and Willie Mays, it's stunning that it's fallen off like it has," Selig said. "We've gotten away from promoting baseball in the inner cities. I think there was a void there in the '70s, maybe back into the late '60s and going into the '80s. Now we're trying to make up for time. We're trying to do as much as we can to stimulate the game."

Already promoting baseball with youth in 185 cities through the Reviving Baseball in the Inner City program the past several years, along with programs that fund Little League fields, MLB has stepped up aggressively this year with a $3 million Urban Youth Academy under construction on the campus of Compton Community College in the Los Angeles area.

Besides the Twins, the only other possible all-black starting outfield in the majors on Opening Day is in San Francisco, where Barry Bonds and Marquis Grissom could be joined by Michael Tucker or Jeffrey Hammonds.

I do however, find this disturbing:

Hunter, whose best sport was football as a kid, said he took baseball seriously after watching Andre Dawson hit 49 home runs for the Chicago Cubs in 1987 on WGN's superstation.

"I was like, 'Man, you can be successful at baseball as a black person?' " he said.

But the chances of that happening again in his hometown of Pine Bluff, Ark., already have dropped dramatically. By the time Hunter returned to his hometown two years after being drafted in 1993, his loosely-organized youth league had disbanded. Meanwhile, the more highly organized, expensive league in the mostly white area of town was still going strong.

Update: There are some interesting comments to this post. I disagree with this one:

I also sort of wonder - and one always treads lightly when coming anywhere near race issues - if current baseball trends are part of the issue.
It's fairly accepted that one area that those of african heritage excel at is speed. And indeed, many of the great base stealers of days gone by are black.
As the stolen base becomes less important as an offensive weapon, as GMs start to value skills more than tools, doesn't that play a part? There's a certain kind of very physically gifted athlete that does a lot better at basketball or football than baseball, where one has to translate those tools into finely developed skills.
In other words, it takes a much wider range of traits, some of them mental, to excel in baseball than in other sports, so it makes sense that baseball would trend away from a skillset that was heavy in any one genetic population. Especially once we stop valuing those skill subsets that are favored in some genetics as much as we used to.
That, and basketball is extremely good at marketing to inner city youth (to the point of often isolating others who used to be fans, but can't relate to the basketball culture anymore.) And hey, if Selig wants to work on that, it's about the best use for him.

I think Peter comes closest to getting it right:

If you ask the 50 and 60 year olds what they did during the summer as kids, odds are that they will tell you they "played baseball." In the 40s, 50s and 60s both city and suburban parks were filled with kids of all colors and persuasions playing pick-up ball from dawn to dusk.

Many of those parks have disappeared to development and most of the remaining ones are fenced and reserved for use by formal organizations of one sort or another.

There's probably a zillion variables involved but the bottom line is that American kids just do not play baseball as much as they did a generation or two ago. And in case you haven't noticed American kids come in every color and variety.

I seldom see kids playing pick-up games anymore. Do youngsters still play stick ball in the streets of NY? It seems that unless someone organizes a game, it doesn't get played. That's too bad, and certainly a part of the problem.

Update: Of course, basketball is a different game. (Hat tip, Instapundit)

A nice article by Dick Kaegel of the KC Star on the history of baseball in Latin America and how the Latin American influence has grown in the majors.