Black Kids Don't Play Baseball And I Don't Care

Black kids don't play baseball.

In other news, man walks on the moon.

Major league baseball is in chaos. No black kids want to play professional baseball. And the effect of this nationwide shift in the, and I'll use the technical term here, "ludicrously ridiculous, horseshit professional sports priorities of the average, run of the mill, everyday 12 year old black kid" has been so profound that major league baseball is mired in the midst of the most financially successful era in its 100+ plus year history. Damn you, Michael Jordan and your black-friendly aerial basketball dunk maneuvers!

Please, black children of America, for the sake of Bud Selig and John Henry and George Steinbrenner, don't grow up to be doctors or carpenters or teachers or multimillionaire NFL players. Push all those other goals aside because major league baseball needs you. Desperately.

Because there's no way a professional sports league can succeed in America unless it is a beautiful, multicultural rainbow of ethnicities and skin tones.

As a white baseball fan, how am I supposed to feel about major league baseball's crisis of complexion? Should I buy two tickets to every Red Sox game and drive around Roxbury, looking for a black kid with good hand-eye coordination and quick wrists that I can take to Fenway with me and inspire to be the next Coco Crisp? Except my little black baseball prodigy will be able to hit.

"Hey, little black kid, I have a ticket to the professional baseball game tonight featuring the Boston Red Sox, the local, hometown team. Want to come with me?"

"I have to go home, weird white guy, and do homework."

"Ha-ha, you silly, little black kid. You don't need to do homework. You want be taking any grammar tests in A ball."

"You're scaring me."

"And you're scaring me, little black kid who would rather do homework than assuage my white liberal guilt about the number of black millionaires playing professional football rather than doing the socially conscious thing and being a black millionaire playing professional baseball."

This is what confuses me about major league baseball's coincidentally timed (surely, MLB's response to the dwindling number of black players had nothing to do with the increased media attention surrounding the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier) freak-out about the league's demographics: It's not a surprise to anyone.

Baseball has always been really white. Even back in the 1970's when 20% of baseball was black, roughly 60-70% of the league was white. And it was clear to even the most ignorant of baseball fans or executives that the number of black players had been steadily dropping over the last 20 years. If major league baseball was really serious about keeping the NFL and NBA away from its prized black talent pipeline, it would have done something 20 years ago when something still could have been done.

It's too late now.

I find their efforts to reverse a decades-long trend embarrassing, self-indulgent and insulting to fans of every color. Major league baseball doesn't need black players. Major league baseball wants black players because major league baseball wants to feel good about itself. And they expect young black athletes to ignore opportunities in other sports (lets not pretend that MLB is at all concerned with any black kid that isn't a potential draft pick), slog through years of minor league, no-money baseball and emerge as a BLACK major league baseball player, primed and ready for marketing campaigns.

There is nothing altruistic about major league baseball's efforts to bring more black players into the game. They can mandate that every player on every team in the league will wear #42 for the rest of the season and the fact still remains that major league baseball views black athletes as window dressing. MLB's motives have nothing to do with helping black athletes; it's important to remember that MLB is essentially talking about less than 1% of black high school athletes. Athletes talented enough to earn DI scholarships in other sports. Athletes talented enough to play professional football or basketball. MLB isn't building a youth academy in Compton so that it can better the community. It's building a youth academy in Compton so that all those black kids good enough to play at USC for Pete Carroll or Tim Floyd will start thinking about playing for Chad Kreuter.

"Hey, superstar black athletes of Compton, forget about playing in the Rose Bowl or Final Four. How can you pass up a chance to go to Omaha with Chad Kreuter! Yes, Rickey, he is THE Chad Kreuter. Same guy that hit .237 for his career. Don't be fooled- that's a hard .237."

Not to mention that major league baseball's efforts are insulting to fans. To white fans, baseball is saying that you should start noticing the ethnic makeup of your favorite team and if you're not seeing enough black faces- dark-skinned Latino players do not count- then it's time to dust off your book report about Jackie Robinson and demand that your team's general manager start finding some black players. Because you can't root for a team with just a bunch of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Japanese and Venezuelan players. That's not diversity, you Jim Crow-loving hillbilly.

And if you're a black baseball fan, major league baseball is saying that you're a moron. Why would you ever watch a sport that didn't feature players that looked like you? If you're a black baseball fan, you should go home, watch some And 1 tapes and wait for the arrival of more black baseball players. Bud Selig will alert you when it's safe to watch baseball again.

Sport in America has usually been an engine for social change. But sometimes social change isn't revolutionary or headline-grabbing. Sometimes social change happens slowly, quietly, over decades. Sometimes social change can just be as simple and monumental as sports fans not caring what the players on their favorite teams in their favorite sports look like. After spending decades working to ensure that fans only see the color of the jersey and not the color of the skin, does major league baseball really want everyone to start looking at skin tones again?