CSR: Wilson: “Playing Ball” Major League Baseball’s Way

Reporting from the glitzy Rodentia Room at the MLB offices…D.K. Wilson smells a rat.

It smelled like money. So much more money than the public knows, than many baseball writers will let on that it knows. It smelled like tightly controlled information, pablum dressed as “real news” and disseminated to a public that trusts the source far too much. It smelled like racism. With so few black writers on the roster of the Baseball Writers of America, stories about black players are dwindling. Stories about former black players are nearly nonexistent. When these men do seek to do the work they are subtly dissuaded by MLB or their efforts are not given the proper platform to bring a story into the nation’s consciousness.

And with only a 7% black player population and even fewer black ticket-paying fans, MLB is on the verge of leaving black people out in the cold; out side of its stadium gates, as players and as fans. And the owners and their mouthpiece, Bud Selig, do not seem to give a damn.

With a burgeoning Hispanic audience that grows by the day the owners recognize they do not need black people’s money. They know the cheaply built “training camps in the Dominican Republic and other Hispanic-speaking countries are paying off in spades; saving them hundreds of millions of dollars in signing bonuses and initial contracts. They also know that one way to the Hispanic heart is through their MLB heroes.