Developing Trend: Fewer Blacks Participate in Baseball

When Don Baylor, a coach for the Milwaukee Brewers and a veteran of 19 major-league baseball seasons, travels around the American League, he makes it a point to look into the opposition dugout. He also studies the fans in the stands. What he sees -- or doesn’t see -- disturbs him.

“There’s not that many black faces on the field, and there sure as hell aren’t many out in the crowd,� Baylor said in a recent interview. “When I came up with the Orioles (in 1970), out of 25 players on the roster, 12 or 13 were black, and it was pretty much like that through the whole organization coming up in the minors. Then a couple of years ago, I remember Frank Robinson telling me they had seven black players in the whole system. A lot of teams are just like that.

“And most teams aren’t doing much to attract black fans. They say they are, but I don’t see much proof of it.�

Baylor is not alone in noticing the dwindling number of American blacks playing baseball, managing its teams or paying to see its games.

The percentage of black players in the majors has fallen from a high of 23 percent in the mid-1960s to 18 percent in 1991, according to the Center for the Study of Sports and Society at Northeastern University. By contrast, last season, 74 percent of National Basketball Association players were black; 62 percent in the National Football League.

There are two black managers, Cito Gaston in Toronto and Hal McRae in Kansas City. There are no black team owners. There has been only one black general manager, Bill Lucas of the Atlanta Braves in the 1970s.

While blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, attendance at major-league games is generally estimated to be about 6 percent black, a number that Commissioner Fay Vincent says “is of great concern to us.

“The black and Hispanic population of this country is growing so much, no business can afford not to pay attention,� Vincent said. “There is still a presumption that baseball is a white man’s game, but I believe blacks still follow it. We’ve got to translate that into attendance.�

At the All-Star Game Tuesday night in Toronto, seven of the 16 scheduled starters (excluding pitchers) were black. While that number is a little smaller than the all-star numbers of 20 years ago, it is at the next level -- the good but not great players -- that the dropoff in participation is most noticeable. And it is from that echelon that baseball traditionally has drawn managers, coaches and some front-office personnel.

Vincent last year commissioned the Anderson School of Management at UCLA to report on all 26 teams’ efforts to attract minorities to the ballpark. That study, primarily researched by graduate students, has not been released by Vincent and only recently has been circulated among major-league executives. A major-league spokesman said the report was never intended to be made public.

One club official who asked not to be identified and has seen the report said several teams admitted they were “concerned that if they got more minorities to come to the games, they’d have fewer white people. I read it to mean that some of these teams are saying, ‘We’re already breaking attendance records, why mess with it?’ That’s very disturbing.�

“I have not seen the report, but I have heard some teams told them they were not interested in the black market,� said Henry Aaron, who started his career in the Negro leagues, became baseball’s all-time home-run leader and is now a vice president of the Atlanta Braves and an outspoken critic of the sport’s minority-hiring practices.

“If not for the support of black fans in the majors, people like me, a Jackie Robinson, a Larry Doby, would have fallen on our faces,� Aaron said. “Unfortunately, most black people now look at baseball as a white man’s sport. That’s no surprise to me. But we’re losing black Americans on the field and off the field.�

Black participation in baseball has dwindled over the years, particularly in cities where basketball and to a lesser degree, football, have become the sports of choice.

Said Orioles first baseman Randy Milligan: “If you go and look at the cities, you don’t see the kids playing baseball. Out on the streets, the kids are playing basketball. They want to be football or basketball stars, not baseball players. Baseball has become really a suburban game.

“You have to look at who are the role models for the young black kids who want to be athletes. It’s Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, not Eric Davis or Darryl Strawberry or Kevin Mitchell.�

In Washington’s predominantly black public high schools, for example, it’s becoming more difficult every year to field baseball teams. This season, all 13 District of Columbia high schools started with teams, but two had to fold because they couldn’t find enough players. At a third, the football coach said he threatened his players with extra wind sprints and longer practices in the fall if they didn’t come out for his baseball team.

With so many city governments in debt, often the first budget cuts are funds to build new parks and maintain baseball fields and equipment.

“In a lot of cities there is just no space available to play baseball,� said American League President Bobby Brown. “And most schools put their money into basketball and football. If you’re decent in one of those sports, it’s difficult to play baseball too. They’ve lengthened their seasons so much, and the training period is now almost year-round.�

“I grew up playing baseball almost exclusively,� said Calvin Hill, a vice president with the Orioles and a native of Baltimore. “My father loved the game. The last night of his life he was complaining about an Oriole game. But now his grandson doesn’t know much about baseball, nor does he show much interest in it.�

Hill played football at Yale and was a successful NFL running back. His son, Grant, was an all-American basketball player in Reston, Va., and a member of Duke’s 1991 NCAA championship team.

Because far more college scholarships are available for football and basketball, the best black athletes gravitate to those sports. Many Division I schools do not even offer full baseball scholarships, including national champion Louisiana State. Orioles pitcher Ben McDonald, received only partial aid when he played for LSU.

Many good young black prospects often sign a professional contract after they graduate from high school when they may have been better served by going to college. More than 75 percent of the players signed in the annual draft have some college baseball experience, but the lure of some bonus money and the lack of scholarship money turns the inner-city baseball player quickly to the pros.

“A lot of these kids go for the quick money,� said Billy Reed, the coach at Tampa’s Hillsborough High School who sent Dwight Gooden from high school to the New York Mets. “They should go to college, develop their skills and their maturity. Instead, they wind up playing in a small town, they get lonely and they get frustrated and before you know it, they’re back home.�

Because inner-city high-school baseball programs have deteriorated over the years, college coaches already on tight budgets rarely recruit in those areas.

“I have 600 kids a year who write or call me about coming to play baseball here,� said LSU Coach Skip Bertman. “I don’t have to search. If I did go (to the inner city), I’m sure I’d find some capable players, but because we don’t have pipelines into those areas or recruiting budgets, it’s hard to know who those kids are. We’re at fault for a system that allows a kid who has more advantages to market himself with a resume and videotape.�

Other than at traditional black colleges, there are no blacks coaching college baseball teams. At this year’s College World Series in Omaha, there was a total of 13 black players on the eight teams, with no school fielding more than two.

Some major-league scouts simply will not work in the inner city. “In a lot of cities, the competition is not very good,� said Doug Melvin, Orioles player personnel director. “They don’t play baseball like they used to, and you’re talking about kids who are real green, raw athletes. And there is definitely a fear of going into some of those places because of the drug scene. I’ve heard guys say, ‘Geez, I just hate to go into that area.’ �

Calvin Hill also has a sociological theory about the drop in black participation and the poor attendance at major-league parks.

“When I grew up in Baltimore in the 1950s, most of my father’s peers had come to the city from the rural south. They brought with them a love of baseball. They all played. They listened to the games on the radio. They’d go out and watch the old Negro leagues, and when black players started playing in the majors, they’d go see Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson. Now, that generation is mostly gone and you don’t have that kind of tradition in the cities.�

Vincent describes the on-field game as a “perfect meritocracy. ... If you can play, you can play in the big leagues.� But front-office employment policies up until a few years ago hardly could be called enlightened.

In 1987, Major League Baseball hired Alexander & Associates, a Washington consulting firm headed by former Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, to implement and monitor the equal-opportunity efforts of each of the 26 teams.

When Alexander came aboard, minorities comprised about 2 percent of the teams’ front-office staff. By the start of the 1991 season, that had increased to 15 percent, and Major League Baseball’s central-office staff had 21 percent minority employment, including National League President Bill White.

“We have come a long way and we have a long way to go,� Alexander said. “It’s a disappointment to me that at the general-manager and farm-director level, there are no minorities employed by the clubs. ... There has not been any blatant resistance. When you have meetings and attend sessions with teams and you see nothing has changed, that is resistance, and that has happened. I won’t say where, but we’re starting to get through to them how important this is.�

Alexander said he is also concerned about minority attendance in the ball parks.

“Baseball has been remiss in not marketing effectively to various black and Latino communities,� Alexander said. “I went with my late father and my son to a game at Yankee Stadium a couple of years ago and I did not see a black face in the place I was sitting, and yet there were hundreds of thousands of blacks and Latinos within screaming distance of that stadium.

“What many teams must do is individual and repetitive marketing using urban contemporary radio, going out to the community. ... They need a professional marketing approach, and they don’t always get it. I keep hearing that it’s an economic issue, that minorities can’t afford it. I don’t believe that. In many instances, it’s just as cheap to go to a ball game as it is to go to the movies.�

Major League Baseball has started to get interested in improving participation at the grass-roots level. AL President Brown in 1985 started providing seed money to youth organizations -- YMCAs, Boys Clubs, Police Athletic Leagues -- in many major-league inner cities to purchase pitching machines and other equipment that might attract more kids to the game. Now, there are 225,000 youngsters in the 6- to 10-year-old age group, many of them minorities, participating on teams across the country.

A few years after Brown had implemented the youth program, John Young, a scout for the Texas Rangers, also was given $7,500 by former Commissioner Peter Ueberroth to start the “RBI League� in his native Los Angeles. RBI stands for “Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities.�

“It’s a struggle, especially in the black community,� said Young. “Baseball has had a terrible image there. You can’t go a block in L.A. without seeing a picture of Magic on advertising. Even the Raiders are so much more visible. Kids wear Laker caps, Raider caps, not Dodger caps.

“There’s not much effort to go into that community and sell the population on going to the games. And the negative publicity about the hiring practices really hurt. Baseball’s got to do something to change that. I know it, I think they know it.