Are Fewer Black Baseball Players A Sign Of Progress?

Marking Jackie Robinson Day earlier this week, Matt Welch attributes the declining percentage of black baseball players in recent years to the expansion of opportunities for black men elsewhere:

Baseball, ahead of other professions, and ahead of other sports, allowed people with black skin to compete. Combined with the deep bench of talent that had been nurtured in the Negro Leagues, this opening led to black participation rates that quickly zoomed north of U.S. Census figures (which these days put the African-American population at 12.6 percent). But as other professional sports opened up and—importantly—became popular, black Americans started picking up the shoulder pads and lacing up the high-tops. Happiest of all, black kids in school nowadays know they are not doomed to max out as porters or bellhops. That doesn’t mean racism is behind us in the workplace, but it does mean that fields of competition in all walks of life have opened up in ways that even optimists would have found difficult to believe in 1964.

Meanwhile, actual “diversity” in baseball has never been higher. More than 26 percent of big-league baseball players were born outside of the United States, across 16 different countries.

Kavitha Davidson pushes back a bit:

He’s not necessarily wrong: Professional football and basketball, both in their infancy in 1947, have supplanted baseball as the primary destination for elite black athletes. But the percentage of black players in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association has been relatively stable over the past 25 years, while representation in MLB has steadily declined.

The problems baseball faces mirror many of the problems hockey encounters in fostering diversity: The equipment and travel are relatively expensive (especially when compared with basketball), and most big cities that have concentrated black populations don’t have the space or resources for sufficient public baseball fields.

There’s also the economics of higher education and the invisible hand of the NCAA: As on the professional level, college football and basketball are now booming businesses, while college baseball is a nonrevenue sport in the vast majority of schools.