The only responsibility the professional leagues should have is to pick the best players and managers based upon performance.
Introducing quotas or affirmative action to sports is antithetical to open competition.
Professional sports are not responsible to groom youngsters. That’s a parental and community issue.
The reason MLB is concerned by the drop in black players is that they are not getting the better athlete as they did up to the 1970’s. You can see the problem in the inept hitting in MLB today. The problem is not at the MLB level, but the grassroots. Baseball has become a sport of the well off. The expensive club teams, private coaches, etc all start today at the age of 8. In my neck of the woods the local rec programs are a disaster. In order to have any future in the game, one must get there kid on a high price club team. Some of these teams cost upwards of $5,000 for three seasons (spring, summer, and fall). Those not making six figure salaries point there kids toward football and basketball were the costs are a lot less than baseball at the youth level. Back 30 years ago, a kid’s parents paid $10 for their kid to play little league, and the best to the worst athletes were mixed on the local LL teams. Today the better players with money are gone off to their club teams. The less well off good athlete does not want to be left behind with the fat kids and the gawks, so he leaves for another sport. The local rec teams are left with kids who cannot play a lick, and in some cases just fold up. Even the MLB’s program called RBI has been a complete failure to turn the trend around. What I have seen in my state is in the desire to win, the RBI teams are recruiting the rich suburban kid with the private coaches to play for the RBI team in tournaments. Why, so they can win. They are not alone. The traditional black colleges baseball teams are mostly white, I’m not kidding.
Without the issue of race being involved, the NHL is also seeing the same problem with their talent pool. Today, hockey is too expensive for most kids of modest means to play in Canada. In the last few drafts, most of the North American kids selected hail from the upper middle class and higher up the income scale. Most of the draft picks come from families who make six figures. No more farm boys from Alberta, or sons of steel workers in Hamilton. Now it is lawyer’s son from Toronto or doctor’s boy from Vancouver. Read an article from Canada that predicted that soccer will become the more popular sport in Canada, just for the reason that most Canadian kids cannot afford to play any type of organized hockey.
In my state, NJ, it used to be when I grew up that in spring sports, lacrosse was the rich man’s game while baseball was the sport of the common man. Now baseball has become the sport of the rich kid, while the common man’s kid plays lacrosse. It is amazing how this happened in only a 30 year time frame.