By Frances Murphy (Toni) Draper
Black American players are only 6% of MLB. An 85-year-old Baltimore Afro column shows how we are back to the future.
The seemingly non-stop posturing over whether President Joe Biden should pursue another term has overshadowed events of note happening over the next 30 days or so — the NAACP convention in Las Vegas, the Urban League’s confab in New Orleans, and the National Association of Black Journalists meeting in Chicago.
For baseball fans, there’s also Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game next week in Arlington, Texas. But All-Star week also features the “HBCU Swingman Classic,” a showcase of student-athletes in baseball programs at historically Black colleges and universities. But the popularity of the game overshadows a more disturbing trend: the number of American-born Black players in MLB is at a historic low of 6%, despite many efforts to reverse the declining trend. And the question is, why?
I asked AI, and it came up with several theories: a shift in sports preferences among young Black athletes, lack of access and exposure to baseball, few youth baseball programs, and the high cost of playing the game.
While these reasons may be valid (who’s to argue with AI?), most sound like lame excuses we’ve all heard about the lack of Black people in boardrooms and C-suites: “We just can’t find anyone qualified,” or “All the eligible, talented players go to college, and “That’s where most of our recruits come from.” Or, “We’re doing the best we can.”
There was a time, however, when Black baseball players in the Negro Leagues themselves were ambivalent about playing in the major leagues, as evidenced by the article below written by AFRO sportswriter Sam Lacy nearly 85 years ago. Eight years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Lacy not only highlighted the issue at hand, but his writing also reminds us why an independent Black press who tells the whole story was needed then and is still needed today.
“Although there has been much agitation for the inclusion of colored players in major league baseball, it occurred to me recently that few people, if any, seem to care a rap about what the players themselves think of the idea,” Lacy wrote. While journalists, fans, and others spoke out in favor of integrating the whites-only major league, he wrote, “no one seems to give a tinker’s damn about the ideas of the guys they’re trying to boot into the organized game.”
Lacy then interviewed four then-active Negro League players — Vic Harris, Jud Wilson, Felton Snow, and Dick Lundy — about what they thought. Some doubted if Negro League players could make it in the bigs; others wondered what would happen to their league if they did.
“We do have some good ball players among us but not nearly as many fit for the majors as seems to be the belief,” Harris said. “But if they start picking them up, what are the remainder going to do to make a living?”
“Our crowds are not what they should be now,” he said. “And suppose our stars — the fellows who do draw — are gobbled up by the big clubs. How could the other 75 or 80 percent survive?”
Wilson was worried about Black men eating, sleeping, and playing alongside pro players born and bred in the South.
“It will never be because the big-league game, as it is now, is overrun with Southern blood,” he said. “Fellows from the South are in the majority on almost every team in the major leagues … The training camps are in the South; the majority of minor leagues are located in the South and there’s a strong Southern sentiment in the stands. There’d be trouble for sure.”
Snow, on the other hand, thought some of the Negro League players “just wouldn’t act right,” if they made it to the majors.
“Some of these fellows who are pretty good out there on the diamond would give you a heartache elsewhere,” he said. “You see, there are so many men that get three or four dollars in their pockets and right away want to tell ‘the man’ where he can go. I don’t know if it would be the best move or not.”
And Lundy thought the Negro League owners should get their house in order first. “We’ve got to get some men in the game who have some money and who don’t have to pull a lot of funny moves in order to cover up every little loss.”
Lacy summed it up himself: “Colored baseball, itself, has now spoken,” he wrote.
The question, however, remains: “What saith the Black MLB player — or the Black MLB general manager, or the Black MLB manager, or the Black MLB majority baseball owner — about the dismally low number of Black players, general managers, managers, and owners?”
Oh, that’s right: It’s 2024 and there are not a lot of people with first-hand knowledge because only 6% of MLB players are Black, there’s only one Black general manager, two Black managers, and ZERO Black majority owners. I wonder what Sam Lacy and those who fought so hard to integrate MLB would have to say about this 85 years later.
*Sam Lacy was the sportswriter for the Baltimore-based AFRO for more than five decades. He became the first Black sportswriter to join the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 26, 1998. Sam Lacy died March 14, 2014, a few months before his 100th birthday.
This article was originally published in Word In Black .
