Troubling Baseball Article

[DFW HOYA]

Amidst BALCO and the various ills in baseball, the Miami Herald reports on another trend.

In 1975, 27% of MLB players were African American. Last year, 10 percent. There are now only three starting pitchers in all of baseball that are African-American.

"And it really started going downhill when basketball was taken over by the shoe companies, and shoes became part of the social culture," said former Astros player Bob Watson. "The National Football League had Monday Night Football, and baseball lost the marketing war.''

www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/8126642.htm

[thebin]

I really don't know if this trend is an "ill." I mean, couldn't you use the same logic to insist that when the NBA started getting blacker, and whites increasingly turned to baseball, hockey, lax, soccer, etc, to call that a troubling trend? I understand why black former major leaguers are concerned, but I wouldn't call it a national problem I guess. Its a pretty basic free market right where are discusiing here at the end of the day, isn't it?

[thebin]

Let's try a little experiment. Lets see how this chunk of the article plays with whites subsitituted for blacks and basketball substituted for baseball:


Lapchick said he believes the reasons for the decline are rooted in basketball's history and in stereotyping.

''You almost had to be a star player to make it on a long-term basis in basketball,'' Lapchick said of white athletes. ``I think some of it is kind of a self-predication, that you're not going to get a chance to ball in the National Baskebtall Association because those places are reserved for blacks. White kids got discouraged from playing basketball. It's probably as controversial a subject as you could come up with..."

Hear that noise? That's the world's smallest violin playing for the white kids who are not encouraged to play the 4 for the Spurs. Also, the article reallyus the issue of boom in the number of Hispanics, both African and non-African, who are doing extremely well in the league.

[TC]

DFW said:

In 1975, 27% of MLB players were African American. Last year, 10 percent. There are now only three starting pitchers in all of baseball that are African-American.

Just a few thoughts.

I'm not going to touch the silly reverse-discrimination arguments offered by thebin above which in my opinion are needlessly political arguments. However, I do think taking these two statistics (1975 and 2003 percentages) and trying to draw any meaningful conclusion from them is a mistake. The author would be better served comparing the promotion rates of African-American players through the minors in 1975 and 2003 to discover any demographic deviation.

I don't have the stats, but I'd bet that the percentage of Caucasian players also declined from 1975 to 2003. There's been a huge explosion in the number of Latin players, and a lot of teams are all starting academies to develop young Latin players for pennies on the dollar. If you want to start a political argument, I would wonder whether the Latin academies would be considered offshoring.

The other factor to consider is that baseball is attracting a lot of Asian talent from Korea, Vietnam and Japan. In 1975, there was one Asian player in MLB. In 2003 there were 24.

While this article focuses on the huge decline of African-American pitchers, Asian players are overwhelmingly pitchers. 18/24 of the Asian players who played MLB in 2003 were pitchers.