Black athletes underrepresented in Division I baseball and MLB
Geoffrey Rowan has been playing organized baseball since he was eight years old, but it wasn’t until last summer that he first played alongside another black player.
Throughout his baseball career, Rowan has been forced to realize he plays a traditionally white position in a historically white sport. The catcher and Weinberg freshman is the sole black player on Northwestern’s baseball team.
“I go to tournaments and people say, ‘Wow! I’ve never seen a black catcher before,’” Rowan said.
As a child, Rowan’s favorite player was Ken Griffey Jr., a black outfielder, but he admits that his ideal role model would have been a black catcher.
“That would have been huge,” Rowan said. “That would have given me that much more motivation for my goals: To see that someone has done it.”
Instead, Rowan has had to blaze his own path in a sport where the number of blacks has been declining since 1975. Although Major League Baseball received its highest grade ever for racial diversity on The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport’s 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card (PDF), the number of African-Americans in Major League Baseball is at its lowest in more than 20 years.
In 1947 Jackie Robinson was the only black player in Major League Baseball. By 1975, 27 percent of MLB players were black. Blacks made up 8.4 percent of MLB rosters in 2007, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES). Division I collegiate baseball, where Rowan plays, has an even smaller African-American population — less than 6 percent, according to TIDES.
Dallas Wright, a Medill freshman, has experienced the difficulty of breaking into collegiate baseball as a black player first hand. Although he started playing organized baseball when he was seven years old, Wright was at a disadvantage; he grew up in inner-city Chicago, while Rowan was raised in Naperville, a Chicago suburb.
“In the suburbs the coaches were coaches first, whereas in the city, they were teachers first,” said Wright. “They just found whatever teacher either played baseball or knew some baseball.”
Rowan also had access to more specialized instruction than Wright did — but he worked a summer job to pay for additional coaching out of his own pocket. Three days a week, he would drive over one hour for private catching lessons.
Major League Baseball is attempting to increase the number of baseball opportunities for children from inner cities, like Wright, according to officials. In 1991 the MLB assumed administration of Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), a program designed to give children living in inner cities access to organized baseball leagues.
“Before Major League Baseball took over the program it was a one-man, one-city operation,” said Silvia Alvarez, a spokesperson for Major League Baseball.
RBI programs are now providing organized leagues and baseball equipment to more than 200 inner cities worldwide, including Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Okinawa (Japan) and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic).
MLB hopes that their efforts through RBI will help reverse the decline of black players in the MLB and give more black children the opportunity to be a part of organized baseball, said Alvarez.
C.J. Stewart, a former MLB player who grew up in inner-city Atlanta, said he doesn’t think that the lack of equipment in inner cities is the cause of the decline. He pointed out that Latin American countries lack also lack baseball resources, but the number of Latin players in Major League Baseball is increasing because Latin MLB players return to their home countries and coach.
“In the Dominican Republic, they use cardboard boxes for gloves, but they learn proper fielding technique,” said Stewart. “You can build a field all day long, but the bottom line is: You need instruction. I can develop a player with a broomstick and a pine cone.”
That lack of quality instruction in inner cities is the primary reason for the declining number of blacks in the MLB, according to Stewart. He said he believes that professional baseball is a much more specialized sport today than it was in 1975, when more than one in four pro players was African-American.
In Jan. 2008, Stewart founded Lead 2 Legacy, the United States’s first inner-city instructional league. He currently provides instruction to 100 children in inner-city Atlanta in hopes of increasing the number of Division I baseball scholarships given to blacks. He said he believes this will eventually reverse the MLB’s trend.
If it does, black athletes like Rowan might find more company on the field and inner-city students, like Wright, will fare a better chance at advancing to the collegiate level despite economic or social circumstances.
As for Rowan, however, the next time he has a black teammate will be 2010, when outfielder Arby Fields joins the Wildcat baseball team.
“We actually got another [black athelete] recruit,” said Rowan. “I was pretty pumped about that.”
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There’s also not enough whites in the NBA…
Bubba
April 8, 2009 at 2:49 am
Right, Bubba. And how about the NFL as well. Of the four major leagues, the racial makeup of the MLB is by far the closest to actual American demographics.
If the author wanted to truly choose a sport and league where minorities (not just blacks) are truly and severely underrepresented, he would have picked hockey and the NHL.
Luke
April 8, 2009 at 1:34 pm
The MLB is not close to actual American demographics. That’s just not a true statement…
And, seriously… you don’t think there are enough whites in the NBA? That’s not because of socioeconomic unfairness… I feel like both of you kind of missed the point of the article… and that makes me a little sad…
CJ
April 8, 2009 at 5:28 pm
CJ: I didn’t miss the point of the article. I understand its point and disagree with it. That is why I satirized it. The fact that you didn’t get it makes me think you’re stupid.
Bubba
April 8, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Give me a break! The world is what it is. Why should there be more of any race/ethnicity in any organization? The person(s) who lead that organization obviously thought it was best for their organization to have it that way. Who is anyone to say it should be different? If whites cannot cut it in the NBA and blacks cannot cut it in the MLB, then some (ivory tower) person should not be arbitrarily and artificially claiming that it should not be so.
Terrfeo
April 8, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I think everyone’s missing the point. Is equal opportunity in sports really a priority? Why don’t we wait until we have parity in education before we move on to glorified hobbies?
jimbob
April 8, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Bubba, I understood your comment. It just wasn’t amusing. And the fact that you resorted to calling me stupid instead of simply defending your statement makes me think that you understood the article even less than I originally thought you did. Unfortunate.
I think the author of the article is trying to point out that there is a lack of equal opportunity in every field. It’s very obvious in corporate America or in institutions of higher education, but a lot of people don’t really see it as an issue when it comes to sports. But it is an issue.
And as for Terrfeo… seriously? The world is what it is? If you’re ok with inequality as it exists, then I really don’t understand what you’re doing here… inequality in all its forms needs to be addressed… saying “the world is what it is” is disgustingly apathetic… the problem isn’t that blacks can’t cut it in the MLB. It’s that they aren’t given the same opportunities… and if that doesn’t seem unfair to you, and if that unfairness doesn’t make you angry then it seems to me that you’re part of the problem, not the solution.
CJ
April 9, 2009 at 12:36 am
White athletes are underrepresented in track and marathon running.
Blacks are underrepresented in horse jockeying.
Americans are underrepresented in hockey.
Men over 60 are underrepresented in every sport.
What might you propose to “fix” this?
Dima
April 9, 2009 at 2:04 am
There’s a difference between people not being given the resources to accomplish things because of socioeconomic inequality and people just not being represented in a field because they’re simply not able to perform the task as well as others. I thought people at Northwestern would understand that… apparently not.
CJ
April 9, 2009 at 2:13 am
“There’s a difference between people not being given the resources to accomplish things because of socioeconomic inequality…”
And who are you to judge that black people aren’t playing baseball because of “socioeconomic inequality?” Maybe they, like smart white people, don’t play it because it’s a really boring sport with little athletic skill required.
Blacks are also boxing a lot less today then they did back in the 1980s and 1990s. Is this because of socioeconomic inequality, too? Are poor Latinos not subject to this socioeconomic inequality? If so, is it actually socioeconomic inequality?
Didn’t think so.
Dima
April 9, 2009 at 3:15 am
did you even read the article?
i’m not the one making the judgement that that’s why fewer blacks are playing baseball…
CJ
April 9, 2009 at 2:26 pm
“Where have all the black baseball players gone?”
We sold them.
Anonymous
April 17, 2009 at 10:16 pm