Unpopular
Answer to a Popular Question
By Gerald Early
from Spring 2007 issue of 108
Recently I gave a 30-minute presentation on baseball at the Oakland
Museum of California before a group of
I answered by saying that African Americans make up about nine percent
of Major League baseball players today, which is somewhat less than their
percent in the population, but roughly about what they represent in the
American mosaic as a whole. So, in fact, they really aren’t under-represented
in the sport. It is about in keeping with their percentage in the general
population. Should there be more? If so, why? How many
Jews play Major League Baseball in comparison to their overall percentage in
the population? How many Japanese Americans or Americans of Italian extraction?
When black Americans made up seventeen to eighteen percent of ballplayers in
1959, many thought this was an achievement; although blacks were clearly
over-represented, no one of liberal bent at the time was disturbed. When blacks
made up nearly 30 percent of Major League rosters in 1975, many people,
especially some liberals and some blacks, complained that they were over-represented
in the sport, as they were in American team sports generally, that blacks were
largely reduced to being entertainers and athletes in America and their
over-representation in sports stereotyped them and distorted the young black
male’s sense of ambition. Blacks were being steered into sports. (This was, in
good measure, the argument of John Hoberman’s
controversial Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and
Preserved the Myth of Race, published in 1997.)
I continued, many people said that blacks being
over-represented in sports like baseball is bad; now, they say that
blacks being under-represented is bad. Well, which is it? Black Americans are
even more under-represented among professional sports franchise owners. People
don’t seem nearly as worked up about that. They are even more under-represented
among people who win the science Nobel Prizes but people seem to feel that the
fact they don’t play professional baseball as they used to is
something like a national crisis. Winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine would do
more for the group’s image than winning the MVP of the National League or a Cy
Young Award, which black Americans have already proven they can do. Isn’t all
of this strange?
Finally, I say that the simplest answer is probably the best: I assume
black Americans don’t play Major League Baseball so much these days because
they don’t want to. This answer never satisfies my audience.
An African American gentleman stood up and offered his theory on the
subject, as he found my answer woefully inadequate. Black Americans lack the
space and facilities in their communities to organize baseball teams and that
is why they don’t go into baseball anymore. This was one of the reasons offered
in a lengthy article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that appeared on
June 18, 2006 (and for which I was interviewed) that dealt with this subject.
“Baseball requires green space and maintenance,” the article paraphrases one of
its interviewees, “Not to mention uniforms, gloves, bats and even registration
fees. To become an elite player today means participating in programs that can
be prohibitively expensive for families with little financial wiggle room.” In
sociology, this is call deficit theory, that is, that one group does not do
what another group does because it lacks the resources to do it. Deficit theory
is almost always wrong. Groups rarely feel forced not to do something because
they lack something that would make it easier to do the thing in question. Deficit
theory is always used to explain the behavior of black Americans.
If lack of green spaces and the cost of equipment explains why black
Americans don’t play baseball today, then how does one account for the fact
that they played it in the early 20th century and even organized
leagues back in 1920 when they had less money, less space, fewer resources, and
faced more rigorous racism than they do now. And doesn’t football require green
space, organization, uniforms and the like and blacks seem to have a great
pipeline in their communities for developing youth football. In the Post-Dispatch
article, black sociologist Harry Edwards says that baseball doesn’t want “to
send scouts into African-American communities, which still today are
substantially segregated and increasingly violent.” Doubtless, this is true of
many black neighborhoods, but it doesn’t seem to be stopping the development of
black football or basketball players or preventing the scouts from these sports
from finding their way there despite the gangs and violence.
I stick with my answer. Black people have agency as much as any other
group. They are not simply sociologically determined, as believers in the
deficit theory seem to think. Black Americans don’t play baseball because they
don’t want to. They are not attracted to the game. Baseball has little hold on
the black American imagination. Relatively few blacks watch the game. The game
is not passed on from father to son or father to daughter; lacking that, the
game simply will not have much resonance with African Americans. Moreover, as
my friend, sports historian Michael McCambridge,
pointed out to me, baseball sells itself through nostalgia, tradition, that
your father took you to the game when you were child, and all that sort of
claptrap sentimentality. Going back into baseball’s past only leads to
segregation and something called white baseball and something else called black
baseball, which was meant to be and played under conditions inferior to white
baseball. “You can’t sell baseball that way to blacks.” He is right. African
Americans do not look at the American past as “the good old days” or “glory
days.”
It is this implicit sense that arises from the
sentimentality that surrounds baseball of the past, white baseball, which
shapes, in some ways, how blacks see baseball today. That explains why African
American sportswriters William C. Rhoden of the New
York Times (October 2, 2006) and Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch (October 3, 2006) wrote very similar pieces about the leak
that Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite were named by
pitcher Jason Grimsley as using steroids. Burwell
writes, “Don’t tell me to take it slow. Don’t tell me to let this thing play
out. Don’t tell me how shaky the evidence is. There is a definite standard in the
public’s attitude (and the media’s passion) in the selective prosecution of
good guys and bad guys in the sports drug war. If circumstantial evidence can
turn Bonds into the ultimate anti-hero … then what are
we do with The Rocket?” Rhoden writes, “The news
media, selectively picking and choosing who to vilify, has been on a Bonds hunt
for two seasons. Now it may be confronted with Clemens. If I know my industry,
there will now be calls for restraint, for withholding judgments. There will be
calls for evenhandedness, for letting it play itself out, following the truth
where it leads. Right.”
No African American in his or her
right mind ever trusts any whites who love too much the romance of the white
past. Who can blame them? After all, there is more to be said about the social
and political arrangements of those days than merely, “That’s just the way it
was.” And more to say about today than “that’s the way it
is.”
* Gerald
Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and Director of the
Humanities Center at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an award-winning
author, has written several essays about baseball and was a consultant for Ken
Burns’s documentary Baseball. He
also serves on the Board of Governors of the
from Spring 2007 issue of 108