Printer-friendly

Contact Author

April 15, 2008

Prospectus Today

Eight Point Two

by Joe Sheehan

In what has become an annual tradition, we were informed today that baseball’s rosters number only 8.2 percent of its makeup from African-Americans, the lowest level in decades.

In what is also an annual tradition, I scratched my head and wondered why I should care.

Maybe it’s because I’m too young to have any memory of overt racial conflict in America. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a mixed-race neighborhood, played in mixed-race sports leagues and attended mixed-race schools. Whether it was any or all of those things, the obsession of many with race in sports—or more accurately, non-white participation in sports—has always fallen flat with me. I have always seen sports as the one place where race doesn’t matter as much as it does elsewhere. If you have game, you play; if you don’t, you don’t. I can’t say my being a white kid was never an issue in a neighborhood that was trending towards first-generation Dominicans, but I can say that on the courts of Inwood Park, your ability to ball was a hell of a lot more important than anything else.

On any given day, you might see 10 Hispanic guys in a run, or five Hispanic guys, three black guys and two white guys. Or six white guys, three black guys and one Hispanic guy. You showed up, you called "next," you got your five and if you won, you stayed. It wasn’t a utopia and I’m not presenting it as such; I’m saying that on the court, game to 20, with the netless rims and aluminum backboards, your skin color was less important than in any other place I knew. You didn’t get to run because of your race; you got it because of your game. Biases existed, but whether they persisted was entirely tied to how you played ball.

So when I read that African-American representation on rosters is at a low point since the early days of the game’s integration, I don’t understand the importance. I analyze baseball decision makers for a living, and I am certain that the decisions they make are, in toto, as race-blind as the basketball courts of Inwood Park were in my adolescence. That is to say that while individuals may harbor biases, and may even act upon them in their words or actions, how they build baseball teams is not subject to racial discrimination. How they select players for their organizations is not subject to racial discrimination. Baseball and, in fact, all professional sports at the highest levels are as meritocratic as any entity in human history.