10008: Diversity Striking Out In MLB…?

From USA TODAY…

African Americans in MLB: 8%, lowest since integration era

By Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY

ST. LOUIS—Major League Baseball, celebrating Jackie Robinson Day Sunday, has the lowest percentage of African-American players since the earliest days of the sport’s integration, according to research conducted by USA TODAY Sports.

The African-American percentage in baseball this season has dropped to 8.05%, which is less than half the percentage of 17.25% in 1959 when the Boston Red Sox became the last team to integrate their roster. It’s down from 8.5% last season, and a dramatic decline from the peak of 1975, when 27% of all rosters were African-American. Even as late as 1995, the percentage was 19%.

“Baseball likes to say things are getting better,” says former 20-game winner and front-office executive Dave Stewart, who’s now an agent. “It’s not getting better. It’s only getting worse. We’ve been in a downward spiral for a long time, and the numbers just keep declining.”

Ten teams opened the year with no more than one African-American on their opening-day roster. There are nearly 30 more players from the Dominican Republic than the total of African-American players. Foreign-born players account for 28.4% of members of opening-day rosters.

The New York Yankees, Los Angeles Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers account for nearly 25% of all African-Americans in baseball, while Cubs center fielder Marlon Byrd is the lone African-American major leaguer in the city of Chicago.

“I don’t even know what to say,” said Byrd, the only African-American on the field Sunday at Busch Stadium in St. Louis during the 65th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier.

“I remember when I came up with the Phillies in 2002, we had six [African-American] players. I thought that was the norm. Now, you look around, and don’t see anyone.

“Will it change? I don’t know. I’m hoping it’s a different story four or five years from now.”

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, aware of the dwindling numbers, said the sport is diligently trying to reverse the trend with their urban academies and annual Civil Rights Game.

“We trying to get better. It won’t happen overnight,” Selig said. “And we’re very comfortable saying it will be better. We are doing great work with our baseball academies and working in the inner-cities. It’s getting better.”

While African-Americans are dwindling on the field, Selig said he’s pleased with the diversity of front offices. Still, Kenny Williams of the Chicago White Sox and Michael Hill of the Miami Marlins are the lone African-American general managers, and Dusty Baker of Cincinnati and Ron Washington of Texas are the only African-American managers.

“I remember Jackie saying 10 days before he passed [in 1972],” Selig said, “he wouldn’t be satisfied until we had a black manager and general manager. If he went through all of our front offices today in baseball, he’d be proud.”

9998: Jackie Robinson Day Not Enough…?

From USA TODAY…

Robinson deserves more than one day

By Chris Lamb

Sunday is Jackie Robinson Day in major league ballparks, where the ballplayer and his legacy will be remembered with tributes and testimonials. All big-league players will wear Robinson’s number 42 on their backs, the only number in sports retired in perpetuity.

It is important to remember that Robinson broke major league baseball’s color line on April 15, 1947. But if we restrict Robinson’s influence to baseball, we do both him and what he accomplished a tremendous disservice. He was arguably the most important civil rights figure, and the integration of baseball the most important civil rights story, in the years immediately after World War II.

When he played his first game for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he carried the hopes and dreams of millions of blacks. If Robinson succeeded in baseball, as civil rights leader Roy Wilkins had earlier said, it meant blacks “should have their own rights, should have jobs, decent homes and education, free from insult, and equality of opportunity to achieve.”

Success vs. failure

Never before — and never since — had so much been riding on one athlete. If Robinson succeeded, he succeeded for all blacks. If he failed, he would affirm the belief of many whites at the time that blacks were inferior.

Nobody in sports ever had more at stake and no one ever suffered more. Nobody in baseball ever received such vile abuse from fans and opponents. Opposing pitchers threw at him. Opposing base runners spiked him. He received death threats routinely.

Robinson’s strength in the face of those threats and unspeakable obscenities demonstrated non-violent resistance long before it was practiced in places such as Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery and other Southern cities and towns.

The integration of baseball came years before the civil rights movement had a name and years before the country had heard of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks or Brown v. Board of Education.

Feat transcends baseball

King said that Robinson’s courage in confronting the color line in baseball helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. “Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable,” King said, “he underwent the trauma and humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Robinson succeeded — and his success cured many Americans of their belief that blacks were inferior and convinced many others that blacks should have the same opportunities as whites.

“As their champion, Robinson had taken their hopes into the arena of baseball and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams,” Arnold Rampersad wrote in his biography of Robinson. “Neither blacks nor whites would be quite the same thereafter in America.”

If Jim Crow seems distant today, it is because of men like Robinson. We need to remember him for what he accomplished inside the white lines of baseball, but we also need to remember him for what he accomplished outside. His life teaches us that progress often depends on individuals willing to sacrifice themselves for something bigger.

Walking into the most hostile of winds for so long took its toll on Robinson. When he died in 1972 of complications from heart disease and diabetes, he was nearly blind and crippled, and his hair was white. He was just 53.

His gravestone reads: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on others’ lives.”

Chris Lamb is a professor of communication at the College of Charleston and the author of Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball.

9595: Weekend Sports Update.

Major League Baseball homerun champion Barry Bonds’ sentence for providing evasive testimony to a grand jury included 30 days house arrest. A picture of Bonds’ house is below. House arrest for Barry Bonds is fantasy vacation in the lap of luxury for everyone else.



Vanessa Bryant filed for divorce from NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, citing irreconcilable differences stemming from her husband’s alleged chronic infidelity. The Lakers guard is probably more shocked and upset over his failed hookup with Chris Paul.



In the final GOP presidential debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry said, “Let me tell you, I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses.” Of course, he’d probably forget the third-down plays.