Posted on 04/01/2021 5:12:28 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
Seventy-four years ago, in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Major League Baseball’s first African American player in the modern era: Jackie Roosevelt Robinson. This historic moment is celebrated as the formal “integration” of Major League Baseball (MLB). For three decades after Robinson broke the “color line,” there was a steady increase in American-born Black players taking the field. But this year, on opening day, 2021, just 7% of players on MLB rosters are American-born Black athletes.
What has happened to the Black American baseball player?
---snip--- At the heart of the matter is money. MLB invests tremendous financial resources into building the human, social, and cultural capital of players born outside the U.S., particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America that it does not invest in low-income Black (and white) players in the United States
(Excerpt) Read more at inquirer.com ...
Unless you are a diversity director in the front office. :)
That's true. Also, you can count on one hand the number of players who have successfully broken into MLB while in their teens, or even when they were twenty or twenty-one. Whereas in basketball it is almost normal now.
This is too easy. They all went to the NBA. Higher net profits.
I find this hard to believe. I don't watch anymore because they allow/encourage players to disrespect the flag and veterans. But 7% would be less than 2 players per team of 25. When I watched it looked a lot higher than that. Now, they may not include blacks born in the Dominican Republic or Cuba, etc., which artificially drives down the number.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. If they don’t have the space to practice the game, they can’t get good at it.
But if the situation changes, they will perform extremely well.
Modern role models
OJ
Magic Johnson
Michael Jordan
Shaq
because baseballs are white?
Golf too.
My grandson is one of 60 kids competing for 12 spots on the hs school golf team. Probably half of them (him included) have had private lessons in Florida this spring.
Bsketball is a simpler game. Baseball equipment is too costly. And the lefties who run our education system and community sports want the kids to play soccer instead because it’s “the world’s game” and basbeall is “too American.”
I live in an area with a lot of folks from India, I see their kids playing Cricket. I think Cricket is going to grow in this country. They are already commissioning building Cricket grounds across the country.
Too many travel teams that require a large investment of cash to travel, play etc. My son had a chance to play for an elite team and the team spent two weeks in Texas and set the parents back about $6k. One of the parents told me later that some of other teams in the tournament were flown in private jets.
Maybe there will be a national cricket league in the US?
I hear the name Cleveland Indians may be available soon...
Baseball equipment is expensive, you need skills other than running and jumping to be good at it, and you don’t develop those skills playing stickball in the streets. It costs money to join a travel team and to get professional training. Also, for those good enough to go pro, you have to labor in the minors for years at slave wages before you can sniff big league money. College scholarships are not full ride, either, so that route is tough.
The real difference between poor urban black kids and Latin American kids, though, is that baseball is part of latin culture. Nobody plays baseball in the hood anymore.
Gee, maybe because blacks prefer other sports?
Do you mean A.C. Green?
Because there are at least 65% of MLB players that are Latin American and baseball has been very good to them?
“I’d always have to tell people that I was ‘basketball black,’ not ‘baseball black.’”
LOL.
Physiology.
Why are there so few Asians in basketball?
I’ve never understood why so many people celebrate Jackie Robinson as the hero for breaking the color line. The hero was Branch Rickey who chose Jackie Robinson; he could just as easily have chosen Larry Doby or Ernie Banks or some other star of the Negro Leagues.
Rickey told Robinson he could not react to slurs or actions during his first year (or, I guess, he’d fire him) but that Robinson could let loose during year two and thereafter.
Branch Rickey was the hero!
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