Major League Baseball may still call itself America’s favorite pastime, but it’s tougher to find many Americans on major league fields as in years past. Today, there are few players from the sandlots that produced African American players such as Ernie Banks, Minnie Miñoso, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson and others who followed in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier of pro baseball in 1947. It’s now a color barrier of a different make and model.
It was Howard Bryant’s new book “Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America” that called my attention to the decline of African American players. Bryant’s book follows the lives of Robinson and Robeson, two high-profile African Americans whose lives were altered during the Cold War and its hunt for communist sympathizers. Bryant closes his book with the simple but surprising statement that there were more African American baseball players in the MLB when Robinson died in 1972 than there are playing in the majors today.
Here in Chicago, the Cubs cannot claim even one African American on their roster, while the White Sox just barely escape the contradiction of the team’s name by one African American, Jordan Hicks, on the roster as a relief pitcher. For a metropolitan area with approximately 1.7 million African American residents, it’s a most unimpressive statistic.
How did this happen? There are many answers, such as African American kids turning to football and basketball, but that may be nothing more than a consequence of changes elsewhere in the baseball world and in neighborhoods such as Chicago’s. The MLB spares no expense signing players from Asia and Latin and South America with deals that make them millionaires many times over; beyond these baseball transplants, the major league roster looks like white suburban little league players grown up.
The new American ballplayer who makes it to the majors today comes from middle-class white America, where from T-ball to Little League and beyond there are well-established baseball programs in property tax-rich suburban high schools with competitive baseball programs, traveling baseball leagues and private coaching for kids whose parents can afford it. Meanwhile, in large cities such as Chicago, baseball opportunities don’t come as easily.
Just recently, I heard a white minor leaguer who made his way to a major league team thank his mom and dad in an interview for splitting the long-distance travel required to get him to two states to compete. That’s quite the commitment from parents who can obviously afford to take off from work and devote time to long car drives.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard white players arriving at the majors and crediting their parents for their success, whether that be coaching and practicing with their kids or driving to countless practices in any direction for any length of time to turn their kids into pros one day. It’s a luxury not all parents can afford; it’s the province of parents who have more flexibility in their work schedules than parents driving buses in the city, patrolling the streets in a squad car or other jobs that offer much less flexibility.
Major league teams such as the Cubs and the White Sox do have community-based programs that support city kids who don’t have the access to baseball that others do, but the proof is in the results. While such programs may sound reassuring as clubs try to impress their fans and their home city with efforts in its neighborhoods, the proof of their success is in numbers that barely show any progress and even less in Chicago.
The concern over African Americans missing in action on the big league baseball field is hardly new. Back in the first decade of the new century when I served on the NCAA board of directors, the Major League Baseball Players Association requested a closed-door meeting with university presidents to discuss the downward trend of African American players and asked if more scholarships funded by the association would be helpful in attracting minority players to college baseball. I left the NCAA board not long after that meeting and never heard whether anything came out of that meeting, but today’s major league lineups certainly don’t show it.
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Perhaps major league owners can take a lesson from the late All-Star slugger for the Minnesota Twins, Harmon Killebrew, who created a foundation to build miracle stadiums with rubberized surfaces to accommodate kids with physical disabilities. Owners such as the Ricketts family and Jerry Reinsdorf could find some vacant lots in Chicago to build small baseball fields and seating to emulate suburban baseball opportunities. Named after African American heroes of baseball, these first-class baseball fields could inspire kids to stay with the sport and make it to the majors — America’s new version of a field of dreams.
Bob Kustra served two terms as an Illinois Republican lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator. He is host of the “Reader’s Corner” podcast, an author interview program that also airs on Boise State Public Radio, an NPR affiliate.
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