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Originally Posted by JRutledge
I think if people knew the answer they would do more to alleviate the "problem." I personally do not see this as a "problem." I think it is the natural evolution of things. There was one time when baseball was the main sport in this country. Now baseball has fallen big time where hardly anyone watches a national broadcast anymore as they did when I was young. It also does not help when one of the most dynamic athletes was not a baseball player and many of the up and coming athletes that everyone knows are also not baseball players.
There was a story on ESPN last week about the Historically Black Colleges which focused on Florida schools like Bethune-Cookman (I have a cousin attending there this year) and Florida A&M (My mom got her undergraduate degree as did her sister and her widowed husband) where the baseball teams hardly had a many Black players on the teams. There was even some coverage of a mostly Black High School where the football and basketball teams were entirely Black but the baseball teams had only a couple of Black players. Now the subjects in those stories did not have any definitive answers, so I do not know how anyone has figured out this problem.
Peace
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I think you have a lot of societal dynamics changing.
- TV exposure - in the 60's it was almost exclusively baseball; the NBA was only about 10 teams, the NFL was only about a dozen, and hadn't merged with the AFL. Kids played around on the sandlot in the summer. The number of opportunities was smaller. Fathers played catch and tried to teach some of the finer points.
- Today, there are more outlets - between baseball, basketball and football you have some 90+ teams. The focus is no longer on baseball. In the last 20 years there has been a great influx of latin players, a lot of whom get the benefit of playing year round. This influx has reduced the number of open spots.
- Players - the emergence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Charles Barkley, LeBron James, Shaq, and others as people that other's want to be just like has gravitated more towards basketball. The same applies to football. By comparison to a lot of people, baseball may seem boring with not enough action or excitement. Baseball is not the kind of sport where players butt helmets, do funky dances after a score, spike the ball, that kind of thing. About the most you see is a high five. No glamour
- Free agency - Baseball is no longer the only place you can make a lot of money or sign lucrative endorsement deals.
- Entertainment value - Baseball is too sedate by comparison to be "entertaining" despite the fact that I love it. People gravitate to what they see as fun and entertaining.
- Demographics and society in general - go anywhere in the US and try to find a pickup game of baseball. Everybody has other activities, parents work, a lot of single parent homes. When I was 16 we used to be able to get enough guys in the neighborhood for two full 9-player teams. Now you're lucky if you can get 5 kids from the same neighborhood to do anything, except maybe basketball where there is usually at least one court in the surrounding blocks. For whatever reason, it's not that there aren't talented black baseball players out there, I'm just not sure that there are enough that are interested in pursuing it as a career. As a kid growing up in suburban Chicago, I didn't go to school with one black student until I was in high school, and the one that did played basketball, and he was a starter and very popular. I used to come home from school and watch the end of Cubs games. There was a lot of black players then, but as a kid I was only concerned with whether the Cubs won. Now, still in the suburbs, my 16 year old son goes to a US Department of Education Blue Ribbon high school that is somewhere between 30% and 40% minority. His closest male friends are one black, two hispanic, one Egyptian, and three white.
When it comes right down to it - kids have so many more choices. As long as the demographics of the US continue to change, the make-up of players in any sport will continue to evolve. When, if ever, it will level off, who knows.