Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES — It’s Jackie Robinson Day around the major leagues, and with it comes all the requisite pomp and circumstance befitting of the moment when baseball finally took its first baby step toward becoming a fully integrated sport. But with diversity came challenges. As the NFL and NBA have grown in popularity, baseball is in danger of becoming a more popular version of hockey, where certain ethnic groups feel excluded simply because of a lack of representation on the playing field.
Looking at the numbers…
The 2022 season is an example of how diverse the game has become since Jackie’s time. Of the 975 players on Opening Day rosters and inactive lists, 38% came from a diverse background (Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American) — a slight increase from 37.6% in 2021. 25 different countries are represented in the big leagues today. Compare that to the NFL and NBA, both of which hover around 70% African American representation in their sports.
But even in a league that isn’t overwhelmingly diverse, the Dodgers stand out. For example, the Dodgers’ most recent opponent, the Minnesota Twins, had only one white American, pitcher Chris Paddack, in its starting lineup on Wednesday. Contrast that with the roster of the Dodgers that day, which was basically Mookie Betts and nine white guys. Which raises the question. If the league is getting more diverse, why are the Dodgers, the team of Jackie Robinson, so very white?
Of course, the team’s manager, Dave Roberts, is of mixed heritage, having a Black father and Japanese mother. And Mookie Betts and David Price joined the team in 2020. However, all around the league itself, Black players are few and far between. For the Dodgers, this problem reached its nadir in 2019, when the team had no African American players on its Opening Day roster. Is this a problem for a team that represents one of the most diverse cities in the world?
So why the Dodgers?
New York Times sports columnist Michael Powell, who has written extensively on baseball and diversity, is perplexed, and wonders about the optics of it all. “It really astonishes me,” wrote Powell in an article a couple of years ago in the New York Times. “Just the economics of it . . . you would think that at least they would want them to have a diverse team. It feels tone deaf.”
Ecuadoran-born Dodger broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, who threw out last night’s first pitch, has said that it may actually have been economics that has led to the current Dodgers diversity situation. “Manny Machado could have been a superstar in Los Angeles,” he says, speaking of the one-time Dodger who signed a lucrative deal with the Padres after the 2018 season. “But he wanted the big dollars, and in terms of how the owners run their operation . . . they weren’t about to make a commitment to anyone, whether he’s Latino or Caucasian or African-American, for 10 years.”
Jarrin’s comments were made prior to the blockbuster signing of Mookie Betts, but there is a grain of truth to them. The Dodgers are less about checking diversity boxes, and more about putting the best team they can on the field. And, offered Jarrín at the time, there is this rumor: “What I’ve heard people say, you know, maybe it’s Andrew Friedman–who came from Tampa Bay and that was a nearly all white team. But I really don’t believe that. Not when, when I’ve seen what has been drafted on the international market, and who they are developing.”
Of course, if you acknowledge that the Dodgers need to diversify, you have to ask which players do you want to get rid of? Max Muncy? Chris Taylor? Justin Turner? Clayton Kershaw? Who exactly?
Lessons from Fernando…
The Dodgers know full well from their experience with Fernandomania in the 80’s how much a Latino star can energize the LA fanbase. And I will lay down a marker and join my Bleed Los colleagues in saying that Fernando should have number 34 retired by the club. And we’ve see how LA’s current-day fans have embraced Julio Urias, and leapt for joy when it was a Mexican pitcher on the mound when the Dodgers clinched their World Series win.
In fact, having foreign-born players on a roster has indeed been proven to have a positive economic effect, with a 2010 study by the University of Michigan finding each foreign-born player added to an MLB roster increased annual team ticket revenue by approximately $500,000.
Of course some of this is silly bean counting. Somehow Dominican and other Afro-Latino ballplayers are talked about in some circles as if they don’t exist, not to mention the huge representation of Hispanic players on most rosters. As if it’s somehow different if you have Mookie Betts in your lineup as opposed to Ronald Acuña, Jr.
And I’m sure if a great POC player were available, the Dodgers would make a play for him hard. You don’t think if Juan Soto or Byron Buxton were on the market, the Dodgers would snap him up in a second?
Dwindling numbers being addressed
And as far as American-born Black players are concerned, it’s lately been a problem of supply more than of demand. From a high in the 1980s of nearly 20% representation, the numbers now sit at their current 7%. There are simply not enough young players being developed in underserved communities to feed the pipeline into the MLB. But things are changing. In the last few years, the Players Alliance, a group of over 150 big leaguers, has started up, and is really doing a lot to try to foster baseball in marginalized communities.
In addition, the PLAY BALL Initiative and the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program continue to be important community efforts that steer children from predominantly Black communities toward baseball and softball. And the MLB development programs further foster that relationship with the game at the high school level. The DREAM Series, Breakthrough Series and Hank Aaron Invitational are fairly recent creations under the MLB Develops umbrella that have had a major impact in advancing the sport’s diversity.
Just since 2018, 635 program alumni (90% of whom are Black) have gone on to play at the college level so far. Eleven alumni of the MLB Youth Academy (which opened its first location in Compton, Calif., in 2006) have reached the Majors, as have 20 alumni of the Breakthrough Series, which launched in 2008. This week, Reds pitcher Hunter Greene debuted as the first alumnus of the Hank Aaron Invitational, which was launched in 2015, to reach the bigs. In fact, local product Greene will be starting for the Reds at Dodger Stadium this weekend.
Trying to do better…
Let’s face it. MLB is wrong about a lot of things in this game, and there are some problems in its diversity issues that cannot be easily solved with the purchase of a few aluminum bats. But, as society becomes more diverse, Baseball needs to embrace that diversity so that every kid will be able to look at the game and think, “there’s a place for us.”
