As the MLB gets set to honor Jackie Robinson tomorrow, the lack of African-American players in baseball is even more conspicuous than usual. A game that pioneered racial integration in professional sports has lost almost all of its black participants to more popular games like football and basketball, and black players are harder to find in the MLB than any time since Robinson broke the color barrier. Besides dwindling popularity, why is this happening? According to Chris Isidore of CNNMoney.com, economic efficiency, or inefficiency, is the biggest factor black athletes are no longer catching the eye of MLB front offices.
"The international market is more economically efficient," said Vince Gennaro, a consultant to numerous major league teams and the author of "Diamonds and Dollars," a book about the economics of baseball. "This is the place where the high revenue teams can leverage their economic advantage."Another factor is the tendency for domestic talent to make its way through college before the draft, both because front offices lean toward proven college players when drafting and because there are financial advantages for players to improve their skills in college.
The players who are drafted out of high school have only two options -- accept the top salary and signing bonus offered by the team, or go to college and hope they will be picked in a higher draft position a year or two down the road. With baseball salaries rising steadily, more see an advantage to try the college path.These reasons -- coupled with the higher amount of scholarships available in football and the popularity of basketball -- have more and more black athletes, especially low-income black athletes, spurning baseball. With all of those factors in mind, it's going to be a long, arduous climb before baseball can regain the legacy Jackie Robinson stands for. It may never happen.
(HT: Baseball Primer Newsblog)
Previously at FanHouse:
Are Too Many Players Wearing Jackie Robinson's Number?
Before Civil Rights Game, Preston Wilson Looks at MLB's Race Issue
C.C. Sabathia Wants to See More Black People in the Locker Room
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
I buy the argument that the international market is more efficient -- but wouldn't that decrease American white players as much as it decreases American black players?
Also, this may just be my naivete, but it seems like baseball for kids is more a game of the white suburbs. Growing up in the city, the only game we *could* play was basketball, because all you needed was a playground court and one kid to have a ball. We couldn't have played baseball if we'd wanted to -- there were no diamonds, and everyone would have had to get a glove and a bat and all that.
Then there is also the vicious cycle, as mentioned in the Sabathia post. With less black athletes playing baseball, black kids have fewer role models and even the ones with the opportunity might not want to play.
Miss Gossip:
I didn't get all of this across in the post, because I didn't want to turn it into an 800 word behemoth ... but the main effect the internationalization has on the black baseball player is that fewer players are being developed domestically out of high school, both black and white. Since playing baseball in college is more economically difficult than, say, football, fewer African-Americans have a chance to develop domestically, and the internationalization of scouting thereby has a disproportionate effect on the black player.
Those are just the economic reasons. The reasons you describe - no access to facilities in certain areas, no role models, etc - present an entirely different and perhaps more difficult set of problems.
Ah, I didn't make the connection about international scouting forcing Americans into college, which has disproportionate effects between blacks and whites. True dat. And like you said, obviously for any social issue like this there are going to be multiple reasons...
What about playing time that black high school (or younger) players are given by white coaches who tell the players, "You can talk to me about anything except playing time." Do you think that kids just give up after they are consistently benched?