Here’s an AP article today which points out that of the 269 players on the eight teams playing in the College World Series this year, only eight are African American. While I am not surprised that fewer African Americans are playing the sport than 30 years ago, the specific numbers above are shocking.
It’s no secret that young black athletes have lost interest in baseball in favor of basketball and football.
In the spring of 1996, I had a roommate who was teaching and coaching baseball at Galileo High School in San Francisco. That’s the high school that Joe DiMaggio once attended (when he wasn’t cutting school to play baseball—he dropped out long before he graduated) and that a lot of African American teenagers living in the Western Addition or Fillmore attend today.
I remember my old roommate telling me that no black kids at all tried out for the baseball team he was coaching.
Playing little league (police athletic league) in the late 1970s and early 1...
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