MLB To Study Decline of Blacks In Game

Found a good column by Bonami Jones on the Upton Brothers and their parents. Seems like pretty much a blue print for what made The Uptons successful and why there are not more black players. Selig should put Manny Upton on his committee.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jones/070412

Manny Upton suggests that one of the reasons baseball seems to have lost the interest of the black community is the financial burden demanded of grooming the game's best young players. It takes money to get into the AAU programs that produce many of the top-notch high school players.

Without the wildly successful AAU summer program the late Towny Townsend founded in Chesapeake, which in recent years has produced first-round picks Michael Cuddyer, John Curtice, David Wright, Ryan Zimmerman, the Uptons would not have gotten so far.

"The more you play, the better you get," Justin says. "Playing all those games in the summer really helped."

But the summer games don't come to the players. Players have to get to the games. Parents have to be able to make time and put forth the cash to cover expenses and supplies.

"We're both working parents. They had to be where they had to be," Yvonne says. "It was a financial sacrifice. There's hotel rooms, food, etc."

Manny works as a mortgage broker and officiates college basketball. Yvonne worked as a teacher before retiring two years ago. For the Uptons, the sacrifice was manageable.

Wiley Lee is the varsity baseball coach at Great Bridge High School, where he coached Justin. He believes less fortunate black players are forced by costs to specialize in one sport, and the sport of choice in the black community is usually not baseball."

 

I wouldn't disagree. It wouldn't be unfair to think MLB is convening this blue-ribbon panel just to say it did something.

 

It's amazing how organizations will find talent, though.

In the area I covered, there was a very run-down inner-city. One of the worst. The baseball programs in the high schools were a disaster. You know the type.

I'm not sure any of us ever covered a game there. And certainly there were no players there on our all-area radar, or who appeared in our pre-draft piece.

And yet in the late rounds, an American League team took a kid from one of those high schools. An area bird dog must have spotted him. None of us had ever even heard of the kid. Maybe the agate clerks - if the coach ever even called in a game, which is doubtful.

 

Their local Little League.

And yes, there are plenty of parents who find themselves with sticker shock when they find out their kid won't be getting much money for college.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/sports/10scholarships.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

Ah, OK. Gotcha.

Yeah, I don't think these parents - or, more importantly, the kids - see that as a viable option/alternative. I don't think they see it as the same thing, really. I graduated high school in 1995, and I remember girls on the softball team back then rolling their eyes about girls trying out for the team who had just played "town ball" prior.

 

Baron, Little League only -- that just isn't an option for kids who want to play competitive baseball beyond age 12. They don't play enough, and the rules and boundaries are too restrictive for people to find enough quality competition. In an idea world if you could force people to stop the travel stuff it might work out, but as the world is set up, a kid who is only playing Little League is a kid who has little or no chance of playing high school baseball.

 

This made me laugh:

https://twitter.com/commnman/status/322074311756238849

 

Still have never seen even anecdotal evidence of black kids clamoring for baseball. Its always old people wistfully looking for the next Bob Gibson.

 

Fifty or 65 years ago, when baseball or boxing were the only ways for an athlete to make money and improve his lot in life, maybe. But now, there's more glamor and a quicker path to riches (and/or college scholarship money) in basketball and football.

 

Let that concussion evidence get much worse and this whole conversation might seem awfully odd in about 30 years.

 

What's bad for MLB in this regard is that there aren't many black fans. You're generally not going to get players in any sport from a family that has no interest in it whatsoever.

Regarding parental motivation for paying all that travel money: I'm sure a lot of them think scholarship, and for some it's the sunk-cost rule ("I've spent this much, so..."). But I think there are parents who love being travel sports parents, and whose whole social life revolves around weekends at Red Roof Inns in Fort Wayne. I'm convinced a big reason cousins of mine did NOT take their then-teenage son out of hockey when advised to -- because of multiple concussions -- is that by then they had 10 years invested in being hockey travel parents, and taking him out of the sport would be akin to suddenly being outside their only social circle.

 

Regarding "what it takes" for a youth to make in it MLB, here's the lede of Tom Verducci's 2010 SI profile on Jason Heyward:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1168402/



Unfortunately, there just aren't that many African-American parents who are able to make that kind of sacrifice, even if they're present and willing.