The professional black baseball player is disappearing like the ozone layer, and there is much discussion about how to prevent Jason Heyward, Derrick Lee, Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins from going the way of the dinosaur.
USA Today reported that the number of African-Americans on MLB rosters dropped to 9.5 percent, down from 10.2 percent in 2009. In 1975, that figure was 27 percent.
As an African-American lover of the sport do I wish more blacks would infiltrate the game in the same fashion as the NBA or NFL? Yes.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago dreaming of one day playing second base for the Chicago Cubs just like my favorite player Ryne Sandberg did. I played in the mid '90s as part of the mostly black Jackie Robinson West Little League. In high school, I played for the all black Falcons of Harlan High School. At the collegiate level, I was an infielder/pitcher at historically black Jackson State University in rural Mississippi.
However, pro scouts did not come calling after a less than stellar career. But I did have the opportunity to compete with an against a lot of great athletes in the SWAC including current Milwaukee Brewers rising star Rickie Weeks who performed at Southern University in the heart of Baton Rouge, La.
Weeks won the Golden Spikes award (an equivalent to the Heisman Trophy) and was taken with No. 2 overall selection in the 2003 MLB Draft.
But the harsh reality was that few inside our 10-team league made too much of big deal about Weeks' success story.
Black college baseball did not rival the interest of college football and to an extent basketball throughout the conference even though those products have continued to slump far behind their Division I counterparts.
If an HBCU football player or basketball was taken high in the first round, it would be viewed as hope in the black college community. Hope that their brand of athletics was finally being respected.
Hope that maybe the great black prep athletes would consider Jackson State, Southern or Grambling instead of BCS schools who many observers believed had systematically taken them away for the last 40 years.
In essence what I am saying is until the black community begins to care about the lack of black players, the issue of declining percentages in the pro game is not that big of a deal.
We can debate for the next 100 years why African-Americans are not participating in the sport in large numbers. We can examine the socioeconomic factors, the various entertainment options in a digital age or the attraction of the get rich quick scheme provided by the NBA and MLB.
It is said that baseball is a game passed down from father to son. But it is tremendously difficult for the idiosyncrasies of the double switch to be relayed when only 20 percent of black households feature the traditional two-parent environment.
When there is not a single black player on an MLB roster from New York City, Chicago or Philadelphia, it show you how far on the sports food chain baseball has fallen in the black community.
Baseball continues to push this issue to the front burner because it knows it is missing out on the most valuable product in all of sports: The black athlete.
Just look at how the acquisition of the black athlete over time has enriched pro football and basketball.
The talented and marketed athletes are of African decent these days. LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Adrian Peterson, Chad Ochocinco, Ray Lewis and LaDainian Tomlinson are among the leaders in jersey sales, video game covers and the front men for various commercials to push products for our consumption. As a result both the NFL and NBA has surpassed baseball in popularity in black America.
Black baseball players such as C.C. Sabathia, Derek Jeter and Torii Hunter are stars, but they don't resonate with blacks in the same manner as Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays did yesteryear.
Commissioner Bud Selig realizes that if the number of blacks on the diamond increase, it opens up lucrative revenue stream. A whole new world of marketing and promoting opportunities not experienced since the so-called "Golden Age" of baseball.
The black athlete has done wonders for major college football and basketball to the point where programs compete in multimillion-dollar bowl games and tournament broadcasting rights are sold for $10 billion. That is the real reason MLB continues to push this issue. It is not about getting more blacks in the game to provide some type of racial balance. An economic boost, power and popularity is what baseball wants.
It is what the sport believes more black players can do for the league.
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