Blacks in Baseball

A pretty interesting post on the declining numbers of African American baseball players from an economic perspective.

Basically, a young black athlete has a better shot at a D-1 scholarship or a lucrative NBA contract playing bball or football than baseball.

However in my experience as an athlete and a sports fan, I find the economic incentives of sport rather small.

When you are young, I think passion for the game drives your decision making more than the potential for financial success. Granted, this might be because I was a) not a good enough athlete and b) knew I was going to college, whereas many more African American young men a) excel at sports at a much higher level than me and b) don't necessarily have the same opportunities for college.

But, in my case, as a youngster I excelled at soccer, basketball, and baseball. But my favorite game to play was always baseball. I loved it. And while I strongly suspected I was a much more talented soccer player, it wasn't obvious because my baseball teams were always good and I was always batting lead off, scoring lots of runs, stealing lots of bases and playing solid defense at 2nd or 3rd base.

When high school came around, however, the ground started to shift. It became clear that I was a much better soccer player player than baseball, I was getting offers to play on older, prestigious club teams, and to my big surprise, I wasn't a starter on my baseball team freshman year.

I played hoops as a freshman and probably could have stuck with it, but I'm no fool and saw how big the players were getting and it was also the hardest work of all the sports....so I gave it up. 3 sports had really killed me that year and I knew I couldn't sustain it.

The smart economic choice at this point would've been to concentrate on soccer and go for the scholarship or recruitment to a good college. I was smart enough, even then, to recognize this as a long shot because there are a lot of good players and few soccer scholarships....but even so, I knew playing baseball didn't help my soccer chances and there was no shot at me playing baseball anywhere significant.

But I didn't. I didn't because I couldn't give up baseball. It was such a big part of my life and I had friends who would've killed for the opportunity to keep playing baseball through high school and here I was thinking about giving up a sport I loved growing up. Further, I got noticed by the varsity coach my freshman year because they need pinch runners for the playoffs and he thought I was going to be his second baseman of the future. I pictured it in my head - 2 sport varsity athlete as a sophomore. Badass. Delusions of granduer.

So I stuck with baseball. Not only sophomore year, but all four years. I had a great sophomore year in soccer. After baseball tryouts the coach said I could be on the team, but I wouldn't be a starter. So I played JV and we had an awesome year. I hit .488 or something ridiculous and thought I was going to have an awesome varsity career. I didn't. I started my junior and senior year, we won the league both years, but I didn't play well. I hit either 1st, 8th, or 9th. I couldn't hit curve balls well, I didn't enjoy the guys on the team - they were all baseball obsessed. By the end of senior year, I was done with baseball. Totally done.

Since then, I started to grow to love soccer more and more. My college coach, while not a great coach, loved the game and showed us tapes of all the English Premier league games. I always loved my soccer teammates, both in high school and in college, I was close with the boys....and it continued after college, playing on teams in the Bay Area with players who devoted their lives to soccer even though they were never going to play pro. They loved the game.

And I still play soccer and pretty much get as excited to play a good game as I ever did. It's been THE longest and most enduring activities of my life and I am very much still a soccer player....and am now only a baseball fan.

I started playing sports and it became a habit, but then it grows into a love and then the love either sustains or goes away. My first love was baseball, but my enduring love is soccer. I've flirted with basketball and tennis and skiing...but I'll play soccer until I'm 50 barring injury. Maybe that's a dumb thing to predict, but I have been playing 23 years already. What's 22 more?

Young men don't make sporting choices based upon economic opportunities. They are smart enough to know the small chance of success at any level of sport, no matter how good you are....too many awesome people before have come up short, either by getting hurt, not finding the right place, or not being good enough.

Young African American men fell in love with the game of basketball and football. A few love baseball, but it's clear that love has translated to both fandom and to the players themselves. Little Leagues in the innner cities have suffered, like many things in the inner cities, from a lack of care. The structure that drove my baseball love was the existence of a community. Every Saturday, everyone I knew was at Little League games. Dads were coaches, everyone played. With soccer, there was a similar atmosphere, but no one knew the game - we had an imported British expert, but the Dads and moms didn't know the first thing about soccer. They were happy to see their kids run around and score goals, but they didn't know the first thing about technique. We had Little League coaches who had coached for 20 years, would teach kids how to steal 2nd with a man on third, when to suicide squeeze, how to pick a runner off 3rd, how to turn a double play, how to fake out a runner that you lost a ball. I didn't even learn how to do an overlap or a stepover until high school.

Communities create an atmosphere that supports passion, love, and elevates performance. That is what has driven down the African American baseball player....Gary Sheffield and Doc Gooden both won the Little League World Series when they were young.