Valentine had taken a few of his players to the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and that got him to talking, hours later, about the global impact of the league. And while he was doing so, he pointed out a misstep in the way Major League Baseball chose to integrate, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
“What should have been done,” Valentine said, “two, if not four, of those franchises should have been incorporated. Our game would be so much stronger, if in fact, we incorporated those teams, instead of stealing players.”
Interesting. Take the approach the NBA did with the ABA, the NFL with the AFL.
Why would the game be stronger if that had happened?
“We would have black fans,” Valentine said. “We still don’t have black fans today.”
More black fans would equate to more black athletes choosing to play baseball and a larger pool of players from which to choose, by definition, means a better quality of play.
“Those stadiums were sold out across the country for 15, 20 years with people who paid to watch baseball,” Valentine said of Negro League games. “Baptist churches, if I remember correctly, in about 10 of the towns would change the times of their services to accommodate the baseball games. That never happens.”
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Rennie's Tenet Posted: May 09, 2012 at 09:47 AM (#4127197)But what if the USL was a real league? What if the majors created a quasi-Negro AAA league in the Deep South, as a pipeline to MLB? (It wouldn't be a "Negro League" per se, just a loop whose players came from heavily black areas.) As the years went by, the USL would evolve into baseball's equivalent to the Historically Black colleges (Grambling, etc). Politically, it probably wouldn't have worked much beyond the 1960s; the temptation to turn the USL into a baseball "ghetto" probably would've been too great for conservative baseball owners (i.e. pretty much all of them).
Something similar was tried in 1979 with the Inter-American League, but it was a financial disaster.
EDIT: The NBL was one of two pro basketball leagues that preceded the NBA in the immediate post-WWII era.
And someday science will discover why some people can't think outside of the box that they live in. Dismissing Bobby's thoughts as some liberal expirement with the hefty analysis that you provided has obviously illuminated us all. Did baseball not expand at some point? Has baseball, once America's pasttime, not been eclipsed by the NFL in terms of overall viewership and revenue? Might the fact that African-American participation as players and fans not be at least a small factor in this?
I'm not saying that there is a definitive answer to this, but its hard to argue that Bobby V's proposal might have had a long-term benefit to the league. The NBA's decision to have a team in Canada was arguably one of their smartest. Not because Canda was such a great market for the teams they put there, but long-term they wanted to be seen as a "global game" and that decision (along with others) helped that effort. Race, especially then, is such a delicate factor in our society that its possible that purchasing a few Negro League teams might have driven away customers who liked their sport like their bread, but factoring in the likely minimal cost and integration of fan bases would have provided some significant benifit.
Impressive morning rant if the orignal post had had anything to do with liberalism, or politics for that matter.
Impressive morning rant if the orignal post had had anything to do with liberalism, or politics for that matter.
As if your original post had anything to do with anything other than the most cliched right wing / libertarian talking point there is. It certainly had nothing to do with what Bobby Valentine was saying.
If that wasn't the message they did a very poor job communicating it.
The black owners had several proposals to keep from being consigned to irrelevancy, including forming their own minor league or being admitted to the existing minors. They were given some meetings at the MLB level, but were basically left in a "don't call us, we'll call you" position. No one called, oddly enough.
There were owners and executives in the black leagues that could have made the grade in white organized baseball. One, Alex Pompez, became a well known scout for the NY Giants, helping them to their dominance of the Latin American market. But, he was a team owner in the Negro National League who essentially had to take a big demotion to be allowed into the white majors. Having at least some Negro league execs involved in integrated professional baseball would probably have accelerated the hiring of black managers and general managers, which could also have led to retention of the African-American fan base.
And unlike the NFL and NBA, baseball never enjoyed a carryover fan base from the college version of the sport, a fan base that encompasses historically black schools as well as the Michigans and the Southern Cals. At one point in 1947 blacks made up to half the attendance in some National League cities when the Dodgers were in town, but after a while the novelty wore off and we're now at the point where in terms of a fan base, baseball is essentially (and sadly) a "white" sport. Unfortunately it's been a long term march that's gotten us here, and it's going to take a lot of time to reverse it, if indeed it can ever be done.
That's another reason that Valentine's idea looks a lot better from a Horatio Alger POV than it would have in the real world of 1940's baseball.
http://www2.ljworld.com/about/
With the exception of Pittsburgh's Greenlee Field (which was torn down in the 1930s), no NL team ever had a first-class facility of its own; therefore, they were at the mercy of (white) booking agents and (white) stadium owners. Scheduling was erratic at best, especially since the best teams knew they could make a quick buck with exhibition games. And administratively, Negro baseball was seriously lacking as well; there was no "black Landis" to keep the owners in line, no "Organized Blackball" structure.
And when the NLs actually started getting their act together and threatened to make some serious money after WW2...there goes Jackie. (Recommended: Neil Lanctot's "Negro League Baseball" is a fine book, one of few I've ever read that actually examines NL baseball as a business, not some romantic ideal.)
I don't know what the per game averages were but I've seen the highpoint of Newark Eagles attendance as 120,000 in 1946; that year the NY Giants finished 8th in the standings and drew 1.2 million people. It'd be nice to think that black franchises were going to draw equivalent of major league franchises but it's hard to see how.
The one exception to that was the Homestead Grays when they played their home games in Washington during World War II, and often drew larger crowds than the Senators. But you're right, it never would have been sustainable in the long run, not under the existing circumstances.
That depends on how many teams, and in what time period. It's hard to tell just how much existing black talent was around in the 40's, when so few teams were making an honest effort to sign black players, and when politics often played a big role in deciding which players were to be given the chance. You also have to remember the existing biases against black pitchers that worked against them even more, a bias that delayed Earl Wilson' pitching career by several key years in the Red Sox organization. It's hard for me to believe that all that black talent in the Majors in the 50's and 60's just happened to be concentrated so disproportionately in non-pitcher positions.
And yet in spite of all this, by the end of the 1950's black players were dominating the offensive leaderboards way out of proportion to their numbers, even with the obvious hiring biases of many teams still well in place. I think it's entirely possible that if the Majors had incorporated 2 to 4 all-black teams into its existing leagues, with the proper financing they could have been very competitive, without having to sign white players.
Of course all this goes completely against the integrationist grain, not just of today but of then as well, and it never could have happened for that reason alone. But if you strip the good and proper ideological objections to the idea, it would have made for a hell of an interesting experiment.
And yet in spite of all this, by the end of the 1950's black players were dominating the offensive leaderboards way out of proportion to their numbers
Andy, you're a smart guy. See if you can draw the obvious inference from the above.
And yet in spite of all this, by the end of the 1950's black players were dominating the offensive leaderboards way out of proportion to their numbers
Andy, you're a smart guy. See if you can draw the obvious inference from the above.
The only obvious inferences would either be that blacks were only good at hitting (and fielding); or that baseball teams, like their NFL counterparts when it came to black quarterbacks, channeled black pitchers towards other positions. Earl Wilson was one case that comes to mind, but I tend to doubt that he was the only one. Perhaps there's some sort of genetic defect in black ballplayers that could have accounted for this strange shortage of pitchers, but if that's the case, it was a defect that only manifested itself when the Majors were integrated, since there were plenty of very good black pitchers playing before that.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main