You can't create black players from scratch. If they aren't playing as kids, they aren't going to play in MLB. There seems to be a big pipeline in the minors which will reverse the current trends. Cards have three guys in their top 10: Walker, Winn and Hence who will join team soon.

Meanwhile the latam % keeps going up and every year it seems we see a few more Japanese and Koreans. Definitely as diverse as it's ever been.

His primary gripe is that not enough is being done to increase the early pipeline for African-American players. There may be some truth to that, but the same can probably be said of many other sports.

Bulletproof argument.

You lost me at "Alan Dershowitz"

The CNN article cites Jackie Robinson as proof of the benefits of diversifying sports. But the great number 42 proves the exact opposite. He ended racial discrimination....

Violence feels like an appropriate response to this.

There's a lot of truth in this article.

I want diversity in baseball -- people with different appearances, of different sizes, from different countries and different backgrounds -- and I don't want any artificial obstacles preventing a worthy player from reaching the majors. MLB's doing pretty well in that respect, though of course there's always room for improvement.

I also don't see the point of focusing on "born in the U.S." Segregation and racism have never been limited to U.S.-born Blacks. Dark-skinned immigrants and visitors to the U.S. generally suffer from the same race-based treatment as the native-born, even if they don't share the same complicated history.

Just eyeballing it based on skin tone, about 1/3 of the Astros roster wouldn't have been allowed in MLB prior to Jackie Robinson. Martin Maldonado is one of them, and he's from Puerto Rico, which is America but apparently not America enough. (Ferguson Jenkins would also not count by this standard.) Andruw Jones is not African-American but his son is. So what exactly are we measuring?

If it's about wanting to give young African-American kids role models to inspire them to play baseball, I understand there's value in having players that "look like me" (I'm half-Vietnamese and not very big; I was pretty excited when Danny Graves made his debut) but I'm less clear on why those players also have to be born within the same national borders and speak the same first language, since baseball players (from a fan's perspective) spend very little time talking.

"Race" is ambiguous anyway. Jeremy Pena was born in the Dominican Republic and has a Spanish last name, so he's considered Latino/Hispanic, but he went to (at least) high school and college in the U.S., speaks unaccented English, and in terms of skin color and hair texture does not look too much different from, say, Michael Brantley. He's also one of the most attractive and "coolest" (though I'm sure the kids don't use that word anymore) young players in MLB. If his last name was Pendleton instead of Pena, everyone would assume he was African-American and he'd be an example of how MLB is moving in the right direction. But because his last name is Pena and he's foreign-born, he simply doesn't count.

Violence feels like an appropriate response to this.

yeah, that reads like it came from an early draft of idiocracy.

It’s in ownership and management where prejudice is standing in the way of diversity

Every time I see one of these articles, I think of the many reasons that it's not really true (many have been already mentioned in this thread) at the same time I still want to see these articles. It's well known, even here, that baseball is an old man sport, meaning old people are the people watching it, and that often times the youth aren't playing it like they used to. I think these articles exaggerate the issue to be honest, as even among the basketball playing and football playing high school players, many of them are taking up baseball in the off season of those sports and many realize that it's actually a more likely road to a career if you are not in the top 100 of your class at your other sport. (obviously football lineman type aren't going to have a baseball career for the most part, so we aren't talking about them)


Ultimately it's still a way to make a career based upon physical talent, and ultimately people are taking it up. The percentages of diversity might change year to year, but to focus on that is a minor issue, the focus is whether or not there is an inherent system in play that prevents diversity.

Baseball has always been hard to fund/manage . You need a big, reasonably maintained field, lots of expensive equipment, coaches, umpires, 15-20 man squads, and lots of other teams etc. Football has been more successful in dealing with these issues and I don't know why that is.

He's also one of the most attractive and "coolest" (though I'm sure the kids don't use that word anymore) young players in MLB.

Pena is indeed quite dope.

Baseball has always been hard to fund/manage . You need a big, reasonably maintained field, lots of expensive equipment, coaches, umpires, 15-20 man squads, and lots of other teams etc. Football has been more successful in dealing with these issues and I don't know why that is.

It isn't more difficult to fund baseball than football. We see that in the success the DR has in producing big league ballplayers. They're demonstrating you don't need a whole lot of money to build a great baseball infrastructure.

How baseball and football differ is that football doesn't lend itself to full participation in the Youth Sports Industrial Complex (it should be a felony to allow kids play four football games on a weekend, for instance), so the poorer U.S. kids haven't been priced out of the sport the way they have in baseball/softball/volleyball/soccer.

If his last name was Pendleton instead of Pena, everyone would assume he was African-American and he'd be an example of how MLB is moving in the right direction. But because his last name is Pena and he's foreign-born, he simply doesn't count.

This is veering off-topic, but I've always been amused by an anecdote from when Vada Pinson was a rookie in spring training, reached first base, and the 1B coach started instructing him in a kind of Spanglish, assuming Pinson was Spanish-speaking. Vada quickly clued him in that he was from Oakland CA.

I think there is a distinction between black American players and black non-American players.

The players of color are not one in the same and they would say as such.

To say there is all signs of diversity might be true, but it seems kind of tone deaf to the dearth of US born, drafted black players.

Shouldn't you be wearing a raincoat and railing against age of consent laws, Icky Al?

to be fair (I know, I know), the woman who claimed she was assaulted by Dershowitz just dropped her claims the other day, saying "she may have been mistaken." he never settled, while Prince Andrew did.

afaik, there may not have been any other evidence against him.

of course, there still are other ways to go at Dershowitz.

To say there is all signs of diversity might be true, but it seems kind of tone deaf to the dearth of US born, drafted black players.

Not arguing the above, but when figuring the proportion of American-born Blacks one should use the appropriate denominator. 7% of MLB is bad optics. 11% of American-born MLB is less so.

The current Supreme Court cases are basically about this issue. When race was primarily defined as "black" or "African-american" it was easy to build an entire structure around increasing participation for them. But when other races started to see their oxes gored, the issue becomes very volatile. Harvard recently admitted to discrimination against Jews and are currently alleged to be discriminating against Asian - Americans.

What was interesting was how they achieve it.

1. They and many others call Asians "whites" for purposes of calcing ratios. So you can see how this keeps them out.
2. More insidiously, they create a proprietary "fun" score for each student. And, unsurprisingly, the Asians don't do well on "fun ". I jest on the word fun, but that's what it is and it's designed to keep put people who study hard while promoting people who do extracurricular activities

Affirmative action has outlived its usefulness in the aggregate because it is necessarily a zero sum game, but there are certainly benefits from focusing on isolated groups who are under - represented and helping them along. It's just that "Asian" or "African American" are way too broad. What does an afghani have on common with a Korean ? What does a Jamaican have in common with a Kenyan?

I am very happy to see that MLB has arrested the decline of African Americans in the sport.