Blacks are dwindling in baseball at a stunning rate

[kurth]

Baseball's black exodus
By Sandy Grady
Tue Apr 4, 6:58 AM ET

...Baseball is subtly changing in front of our eyes. It has been almost 60 years since April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson in his No. 42 Brooklyn Dodger uniform jogged onto the infield with his pigeon-toed trot. That day, breaking baseball's color line, Robinson became a forerunner to America's civil rights struggles. And in his wake came battalions of slashing, dominating African-American star players.

But the cliché "Robinson changed the face of baseball forever" was half-right - it's maybe not forever. Blacks are dwindling in baseball at a stunning rate. They make up less than 10% of major league rosters, compared with 27% in '75. College and amateur coaches have trouble recruiting them. This generation of young African-Americans - Robinson's mythical grandsons and great-grandsons - has lost interest in his game. Look closely, you could see the metamorphosis at the 2005 World Series. Astonishingly, the Houston Astros didn't have a single black player - the first all-white World Series roster since the 1953 New York Yankees...

But face it, in American black culture, baseball has lost its luster to pro basketball and football as the grail of big bucks and fame... Baseball is too slow, coaches hear. It's the lament of young African-Americans who spurn the game as a "white thing." Not only does the disciplined pace of baseball seem sluggish to this video-game generation, but why struggle to ride buses in baseball's bush leagues when lucky talent might get you instant megamillions in the NBA or NFL? Sure, equipment is a factor. Basketball courts are anywhere you can hang a hoop in U.S. cities, but well-groomed ball fields are as suburban as sport-utility vehicles and soccer moms. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig says, "We know we have a lot of work to do." ...

But I doubt if the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) program and a few youth ball fields will change perceptions. Baseball has fumbled away a generation of black players. Fans, too. And I don't see them coming back. Into the breach roar the Latinos - players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Puerto Rico, in that order, most prominent on MLB rosters. On parallel tracks, the rise of Latino ball players aligns with growing Hispanic political power in the USA - and the bitter immigration debate...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060404/cm_usatoday/baseballsblackexodus;_ylt=Anu445bZctMlubmxods26y78B2YD;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI-

[WI_DEM]

1. baseball is declining in popularity among all races of young people

"The National Past time" of the 20's thru the 70's has been taken over by the popularity of football.

[danalytical]

2. I love baseball.

I love baseball. The only major sports games I watch are A few "Mets, Red Sox, Yankees games, or the superbowl. I pretty much don't care for anything else. I would rather watch some crazy snowboarder jump off of a cliff and do a 720 in mid air.

[WI_DEM]

5. Me too

but it's a fact that baseball is nowhere near the popularity any more than football. One just has to look at the ratings for the Worlds Series compared to the Super Bowl. It's a shame.

[SoCalDem]

6. "Olden Days" baseball had a "hometown" feel to it.

Life was slower then..teams identified with their fans..it was a sport for blue-collar fans who often rode the trains WITH the players..

Tickets were cheap, and Dads all over would yank their kids out of class now and then and play hookie from work to go to the game. It was a cheap afternoon..

That was before players became primadonas and were paid brazillions to play the game.. before they started striking for a better deal and were traded as often as their baseball cards.

There are many more things competing for a dwindling attention span too.

[BlackHeart]

3. Things change

ain't no big thang.

[DS1]

4. When was the last time you saw a shoe/sports equipment commercial

with black stars not involve basketball?

[Igel]

7. There's undoubtedly self-selection.

I'm unsure that discrimination will account for all or most of the decline. Absent discrimination, it's not a problem. I don't stress over AA representation in the NBA or the lack of blacks in my field (Slavic linguistics ... go figure). Ability counts for nothing if there's not interest.

There's also this snippet, a few years old, and partially updated (below): http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2003/07/10/black_ballplayer/
"The decline of the black ballplayer has coincided most notably with the rise of the Latino player. (The number of white players in the major leagues has held between 58% and 62% every year from 1995 through 2002 -- down from 70% in 1990.) Latins held a record 28% of roster spots last year, up from 20% in '96 and more than double the 13% in '90. Their number should continue to rise as 46% of the 6,196 minor league players at the start of this season were foreign-born, with most of them coming from Latin America."

The USA Today article relates the increase in Latino representation to the growth of Latino power, but doesn't mention the inverse correlation or the proportion of whites staying about fixed or also dropping. In any event, the absolute numbers are small.

http://www.bus.ucf.edu/sport/cgi-bin/site/sitew.cgi?page=/ides/index.htx has links to race/gender stats for sports, not just MLB, and not just players within MLB. One link updates the stats to 2004, when 9% of MLB baseball players were AA, 37% Latino, 2% Asian. Do the arithmetic: whites were at ~52%, below the range quoted in the SI article. I haven't found stats for 2005 or 2006, I'm sure somebody's counted them all up.