Participation dwindles at all levels of baseball,
and the social trend has many concerned
Stories by Tribune staff reporter Michael Hirsley

July 18, 2004

As a special assistant to Cubs general manager Jim Hendry, Gary Hughes spends a good portion of his time scouting baseball players.

The affable, well-traveled Hughes might know more people at more levels of baseball than anyone else in the game, having been involved in scouting for 37 years and having worked as scouting director for four teams. He is regarded as one of baseball's shrewdest talent evaluators.

But like many in the game, Hughes, 63, is puzzled by a trend that has grown more pronounced in recent years: the dwindling participation of African-American players at all levels of baseball, most notably the major leagues.

African-American players claimed barely 10 percent of the spots on this year's Opening Day rosters, according to a Tribune survey.

Only three African-Americans--Barry Bonds, Barry Larkin and Ken Griffey Jr., who was injured and missed the game--were on the 2004 National League All-Star squad. That is an astonishing development in the league that was home to Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Bob Gibson and dozens of other black superstars through the 1950s and 1960s.

The American League roster included seven African-Americans for a total of 10 among 64 All-Stars. That's 15.6 percent.

The American team of 25 top prospects from throughout the minor leagues that took on "the world" in the Futures Game last weekend included only four African-Americans.

In 1975, when Hughes was scouting for the San Francisco Giants, 27 percent of major-league players were black, as were 16 of the 57 players (28 percent) in that season's All-Star Game. The figure was down to 20 percent by 1990.

"It's extremely noticeable, a staggering phenomenon," Hughes said.

Several factors have been cited, some of them economic. Baseball is expensive, from the cost of equipment to maintaining fields to operating youth leagues.

Some are sociological. Kids whose fathers are absent don't grow up in the father-to-son tradition that represents many boys' introduction to the game. Youth leagues in neighborhoods where fathers are absent suffer from a shortage of volunteer dads who make up the vast majority of youth-league coaches. On the high school level, professional scouts tend to avoid certain inner-city neighborhoods, where the caliber of play reflects declining numbers and diminished interest.

Some are societal. In an age of increased specialization, baseball is rarely the first choice of elite inner-city athletes. It's a slow-paced game that's difficult to master. Even the best prospects require a minor-league apprenticeship.

Meanwhile, the best basketball prospects can become highly paid NBA pros as teenagers. And a football apprenticeship is likely to be served in a big-time college program with perks that are far more appealing than dreary minor-league bus rides.

Specialization hurts

Hughes ran the Montreal Expos' amateur draft for seven years as their scouting director, and in six of those years their top pick was an American-born black player. Among them were Delino DeShields, Charles Johnson, Rondell White and Cliff Floyd.

Hughes moved to the Florida Marlins as scouting director in 1992, and his first-round pick was Johnson, who hadn't signed with the Expos. The Miami-bred catcher was the only American-born black player Hughes took in the first round of the four drafts he ran for the Marlins.

"African-Americans just aren't playing baseball in the numbers they once did," Hughes said.

Though he can't pinpoint a single reason, he cites the "age of specialization" as a significant factor.

Football and basketball and the lure of college scholarships have always competed with baseball for the elite athlete, "but baseball still had a chance because all-around athletes got to play all sports," Hughes said. "Now, at the high school level and even younger, more athletes are steered into one sport and away from others."

Duane Shaffer, the White Sox's director of player personnel and former scouting director, has seen the result of that specialization.

"I've been in Texas maybe 200 times, and I've seen great black athletes at the high school level with outstanding baseball potential," he said. "And when I go back a couple of years later, they've lost their agility and become muscle-bound football players.

"I can understand how it happens. Thousands of fans go to football and basketball games, and maybe a hundred go to baseball games."

Other sports as competitors

Bob Watson went into baseball administration after a 19-year playing career as a hard-hitting outfielder/first baseman for four teams. Watson, 58, vice president of on-field operations for Major League Baseball and former general manager of the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros, grew up in Los Angeles and watched as baseball receded behind other sports.

"We started losing the African-American athlete in the early 1970s, when two things happened," he said. "Football and basketball stepped up recruitment of black athletes, particularly into colleges, where those are the revenue sports. Baseball stopped recruiting in the inner cities, perceiving them to be more dangerous."

Watson saw the growing emphasis on football and basketball as revenue sports filter down to the high school level and below.

"Coaches wanted stud athletes to focus on basketball or football or they wouldn't start, and that deterred them from baseball," he said.

Watson said the decline of African-Americans in baseball "is a concern to me. Often we have the runt of the litter playing instead of the stud athlete. We don't even have the stud players in college ball."

White Sox general manager Ken Williams, who played football and baseball at Stanford, agreed.

"You'll be hard-pressed to find African-Americans in college baseball," he said."Drop a level to high school and you'll find a few more playing the sport, but not as many of the pure athletes."

As Williams spoke last month, the TV in his U.S. Cellular Field office was tuned to a College World Series game. He and a visitor searched the screen in vain to find an African-American among the Texas and Georgia players on the field.

Cubs manager Dusty Baker, a three-sport prep athlete who signed with the Atlanta Braves out of Sacramento's Del Campo High School in 1967, says there's an economic explanation for the paucity of black college players.

"I don't think anybody gets a full scholarship," he said. "A school has 11 1/2 scholarships to divide up among 25 to 30 players. Say you get a half-ride to an outstanding baseball school like Rice University or Stanford. You've still got to come up with $15,000 or more to go there, and how many black kids can do that? Even the state schools are expensive if you don't have a scholarship."

Some schools are able to make up the difference with need-based financial aid.

Notre Dame, which has put together one of the Midwest's strongest baseball programs, had one African-American walk-on on its roster in the 2004 season. Under NCAA rules, coach Paul Mainieri has 11.7 scholarships to divide among the 30 to 35 players in his program in a typical year.

"The long and the short of it is we have to rely on a lot of walk-ons," school spokesman Pete LaFleur said.

Colleges top talent source

At a time when fewer than 7 percent of Division I college baseball players are black, professional baseball has become increasingly reliant on the college game as a source of talent--70 percent of the players taken in the first 10 rounds of this year's amateur draft were from college, according to Baseball America magazine.

"[Teams] want a quicker return on their investment," Baker said. "They're not patient enough to wait for high school kids to develop."

Major League Baseball instituted its amateur draft in 1965. Shaffer, who joined the White Sox in 1969, remembers "a 60-40 majority" of high school players being selected in the draft's early years.

"We used to look at college kids as not very good," he said. "Now, more and more college players are drafted, and fewer are drafted from high school. You've got a number of major-league teams that only draft from college. If you cut high school kids out of the draft, you're cutting them out of baseball."

Along with Watson, Jimmie Lee Solomon is Major League Baseball's highest-ranking African-American executive as vice president of baseball operations. And like Watson, he is alarmed by the decline in black participation.

"The numbers are very stark," he said.

Latinos take up slack

Yet the decline in African-American participation is almost offset by an expanding Latin American influence. Players from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela held nearly 28 percent of the spots on this year's Opening Day rosters. Asians claimed 2 percent.

"When you first look at the faces, it doesn't look as stark because there are so many minorities from Latin America," Solomon said.

For that there is an economic explanation.

"Major-league teams have established baseball academies all over the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, for example, because once a prospect there turns 16 1/2, that team can sign him," Solomon said. "But in the U.S., no matter where a young player learns the game, no matter what team invests in that education, once he turns 17, he goes into the draft."

Solomon saw how reluctant individual teams were to make that investment, so he pushed for MLB to establish a youth baseball academy in Compton, Calif., a training facility designed for inner-city youngsters. Groundbreaking took place in June, and it's scheduled to open next summer.

He envisions the academy, non-exclusionary and free of charge, as an outreach to urban minority boys and girls from ages 10 to 17 with an emphasis on teaching baseball and softball skills.

It is part of Major League Baseball's response to the decline in African-American players. That response includes a Little League Baseball Urban Initiative Program and RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities), which provides baseball equipment and fields to economically disadvantaged youths. The programs seek to revive interest in baseball, and they include academic components.

Among the 121,000 youngsters 5 to 18 in RBI, 55 percent are African-Americans.