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THE BLACK PAST TIME?
by Alfred Parsard, age 18.
He is a student at 826NYC.
 826NYC's next publication,
STEW: The Magazine About Et
Cetera, The Sports Issue, will be
released this summer. Check in at
www.826nyc.org for more info,
or make a donation to help print
this issue.
The 2008 World Series was historic and exciting. The American League Champion Tampa Bay Rays finally bested the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, their better-known (and better-funded) division rivals, only to lose to the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies, a franchise with its own epic history of bad fortune.
The Series was also were notable for the fact that only six out of 50 players on the two teams’ rosters—just 12 percent—were African American. Even that figure is higher than Major League Baseball as a whole, where just six percent of all players are black.
Sixty-eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier as a second baseman with the Brooklyn Dodgers, baseball is going through a stark decline in the number of African American players. After reaching a high of thirty percent of all players in the 1980s, the number has been declining for more than 15 years, and it doesn’t look like anything’s going to change in the near future.
“I don’t know why African American youths ever lost interest in baseball,” Raymond Douglass, a Little League coach in Paterson, NJ, says. “Personally, I blame the [popularity] of basketball in inner cities,” he says, noting that pick-up basketball or football games can occur almost anywhere while baseball diamonds are much harder to set up and maintain. “I go to my son’s open house for his school and all the kids talk about is [Cleveland Cavaliers forward] LeBron James or [Patriots quarterback] Tom Brady—never someone like [Yankees third baseman] Alex Rodriguez.”
Last season, despite his recruiting efforts, Douglass’s team didn’t have any African-American players. That’s a stark contrast to the youth basketball team Douglass coached that winter. When he asked his basketball players is any of them were interested in trying out for his Little League squad, they all said no.
In Brooklyn, it often seems as if the only connections between African American communities and baseball are New Era-brand fitted baseball caps. At a Modell’s Sporting Goods in East New York—a heavily African American neighborhood—store manager Justin Perry says the New Era Yankees cap is the store’s best-seller, but not because his costumers are die-hard baseball fans. “It’s highly fashionable and matches almost anything,” he says. “Most people come in here looking to buy a fitted cap not because they like the team but because it matches their clothes. I have [New Yorkers] come in here and buy a Red Sox cap just because it matches their Coogi sweater.” (Perry says he’s been known to do the same thing.)
Team jerseys, on the other hand, are a different story. “The only jerseys that sell well are NBA and NFL jerseys,” he says. “We had to slash the price on our MLB jerseys twice in the last five months.” Baseball DVDs aren’t selling either: one Yankees World Series DVD was recently marked down to $5.
According to Douglass, this is a real problem. “I think we should actually talk to [African American youths] and see why they do not like baseball so we can get a clear understanding of where they are coming from,” he says. If baseball hopes to build on a tradition that stretches from Negro League legends like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige to modern-day All Stars like Phillies slugger Ryan Howard and Rays speedster Carl Crawford, something is going to need to be done.
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