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Sunday, April 15, 2007
Baseball’s still telling the ‘big lie’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
They kept coming. Hundreds of them. All of those African-American baseball players from just two youth leagues in Fulton County kept streaming out of the tunnel in the right-field corner of Turner Field on Sunday before the Braves’ game against the Florida Marlins.
Somebody’s lying.
Either that, or this was a mirage on what was called “Jackie Robinson Day” throughout the major leagues.
Then again, maybe those 350-something kids with baseball caps, team jerseys and wide eyes didn’t get the word: African-Americans don’t play baseball.
You also had that other scene representing many around the ball park. Within a hook slide of Hank Aaron’s statue on the plaza, Tony Mulrain, 38, squatted to give a hotdog to Morgan, his six-year-old son. They are African-Americans. “This is his first baseball game,” said Tony, glowing nearly as much as the younger Mulrain, who cheerfully wrapped his fingers around the largest bun he’d ever seen.
Guess the Mulrains from Marietta got lost along their way down I-75 to watch folks dribble or tackle.
Which brings us back to the biggest lie in the history of sports: Not only have African-Americans stopped playing baseball as youth, but they all prefer All Mighty Football and Basketball to the sport that Robinson used to become a baseball and civil rights icon. Worse, to hear proponents of sports’ Big Lie tell it, the primary reason why the number of African-American players in baseball has dropped from 27 percent in 1975 to 18 percent in 1982 to barely eight percent this season is because African-Americans don’t care about the game anymore.
With apologies to the late Jack Buck, I guess we aren’t supposed to believe what we just saw on Sunday.
“Wow. I’ll tell you what. I never even heard any of this stuff about African-Americans not liking baseball and preferring to play other sports instead of baseball until I got into the professional ranks,” said Dontrelle Willis, shaking his head in the Marlins’ clubhouse. He is their 25-year-old ace who already ranks among the game’s elite.
Willis also is an African-American from Oakland, Calif. Added Willis, “Where I’m from, everybody plays baseball. Latins. Whites. African-Americans. You think about C.C. Sabathia, and he is from the [San Francisco] Bay area. So is Jimmy Rollins, and Jermaine Dye. It’s really sad, because contrary to what is being said, African-Americans are playing baseball everywhere. Just not in the majors.”
For verification, there were the cold, blustery and gray conditions on Sunday afternoon at Turner Field. How appropriate for an occasion that deserved clouds instead of sunshine. There were as many African-American players in both dugouts combined as there were 60 years before when a Brooklyn Dodgers rookie slid by baseball’s color barrier.
One.
That one was Willis, the only one for the Marlins. In contrast, the Braves join the Houston Astros as the only teams in the majors with zero African-Americans on their 40-man rosters. Just 11 years ago, after the Braves won their only world championship in Atlanta, they started that season with 11 African-Americans on their 40-man roster. This contributes to the strangeness of it all: The Braves have made their fairly quick evolution over the years toward operating without African-Americans players in what supposedly is “the black mecca.”
John Smoltz, the Braves veteran pitcher, who usually has deep thoughts on everything, paused, and then he paused some more. “Uh,” said Smoltz, before another long pause. “You know, obviously, you have trends in baseball. … I actually have no idea. I don’t have any reasons. I don’t have a theory. I’m just going to remember this day for what it stands for, and not for maybe what it doesn’t stand for, if that makes sense.”
Well, it does. You have theory, and then you have reality. In theory, Robinson’s legacy still lives in the majors, with the game retiring his No. 42 and developing a few token initiatives supposedly to attract African-American players. In reality, baseball officials care more about promoting the Big Lie than finding African-American players.
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