Rebuilding Black Participation in Baseball

Graham Womack pens a well researched article in the Sacramento Bee on efforts to encourage more participation in baseball by young Americans of African decent. Womack does a good job of covering all the issues, from poorly maintained playing fields to the expense of travel teams. He also hits on two key issues that helped drive down the number of African Americans in the game. The first is the draft:

The number of people of color in baseball “has enlarged dramatically,” MLB Official Historian John Thorn noted. This is because most MLB teams have invested heavily in development academies in Latin America, where players can be signed at age 16, more cheaply and without going through baseball’s draft.

“It’s really been a strategy of offsetting the cost of paying for U.S. prospects,” said Adrian Burgos Jr., a University of Illinois history professor and author of the 2007 book Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line.

An unintended consequence was a narrowing of baseball’s demographics.

“There aren’t as many working-class white kids that are playing anymore, either,” baseball researcher Armour said. “You have poor Dominicans and Venezuelans and whatnot, and you have middle-class white kids. That’s who plays baseball.”

The second is the NCAA:

Financial concerns also might be keeping African-Americans out of college baseball, where each NCAA team is allocated just 11.7 scholarships.

Former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent remembered a conversation he had during a long car ride with good friend Larry Doby, a Hall of Famer, the American League’s first black player in 1947, and a product of Newark, N.J.

“He was a very good basketball and football player,” Vincent told SN&R. “He said, ’If I wanted to get an education, it would be much harder to get a scholarship in New Jersey to a baseball school. There’s a lot more football and basketball scholarships.’ And Larry Doby knew what he was talking about.”

Both the draft and the limited scholarships are designed enhance competitive balance. The draft stopped richer teams from buying up all the good, young talent (and driving the price up for that talent). The NCAA stopped the rich schools from giving out unlimited scholarships to have the best team. (It also stopped alumni from doing nice things for a poor kid and his or her family.) So both ended up hurting poor people.

The draft and he NCAA hurt lower income and poor people. The NCAA is an odious institution that should be eliminated, but there’s nothing MLB can do about that. They can eliminate the draft, however. If social justice warriors want to make a change that actually helps people, now is the time to turn their ire on baseball. The CBA is up for negotiations, and instead of allowing a push for an international draft, the push should be to eliminate the draft. An international draft will eliminate the poor people of Latin America from baseball, just like it eliminated the poor people of the United States. MLB needs to be convinced to do the moral thing, and eliminate the draft.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/1MVLtRA