I read with dismay an article entitled “Harlem Little League faces steep registration decline as 35th season looms,” in the February 8, 2024, in the Amsterdam News, both because of the evident loss of interest of Black kids in baseball and the lost opportunity for Black kids to play baseball.
I am a native Washingtonian. I was born three years after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues and with just enough time to fall in love with the Washington Senators, the most hapless professional baseball franchise in the history of the sport. The Senators’ last World Series Championship was 1929. When Yankees or Mets fans whine about not having won a championship in the last 10 years, I can only chuckle (or cry).
There was not much point in checking the Major League Baseball standings when I was a kid—for the better part of every season, the Senators were dead last.
But the beauty of baseball is that there is an almost fanatical obsession with the statistical accomplishments of individual ballplayers. Consequently, if your team is losing, you can still follow the exploits of your favorite individual players.
For Black kids growing up in the 1950s, as more and more Black players broke the color line, it became a source of pride to check the sports section of the Sunday morning paper to see how many Black players led the major leagues in the most important statistical categories. It was often the case that most of the top 10 in batting average, RBIs, and homers were Black.
The success of those early Black ballplayers would not have come as a surprise to my father. Before he joined the Army at the start of WWII, he worked as a concessionaire at Griffith Stadium, the original home of the Washington Senators.
The Senators shared the stadium with the old Negro Leagues. I know there were occasions when my dad saw the pathetic Senators play the day before or the day after a Negro League game. He saw first-hand Negro League stars like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige, and Jackie Robinson (pre-integration) perform at the highest level of the sport and he knew that only their color excluded them from competing against the likes of the Washington Senators.
My father would be so disappointed to know that no American-born Black players participated in the 2022 World Series. I am sure he could not imagine that the number of African American major league ballplayers has dwindled to 6%.
As a result of the shrinking numbers of African American kids playing Little League baseball, there will be fewer and fewer African Americans playing in the major leagues.
Reversing this trend begins with stimulating the interest in baseball of African American kids. In my view, nothing stimulates that interest like attending a Major League game. When I was a kid, the Senators, in partnership with the Washington Post, established “The Knothole Gang,” a virtual club that let kids clip a coupon from the newspaper allowing free entry to a Senators game for any youngster accompanied by an adult.
It is in the interest of Major League Baseball to increase access to games for African American kids who might otherwise be drawn to other sports. Particularly as fewer games are telecast for free, both future fans and players will be lost to the sport. Major League Baseball should regard increasing access to the game for African American youngsters as an investment in the future of the game. A good start would be updating the Washington Senators’ Knothole gang model (there were no personal computers or smartphones in the 1950s—no need to clip paper coupons in 2024!).
A subset of youngsters newly attracted to Major League Baseball would be inspired to participate in the sport, and not just as players. The industry of baseball is supported not only by players but by statisticians who provide the data needed to recruit and trade ballplayers. Among my first practical applications of classroom math skills was in the calculation of baseball batting averages, on-base percentages, and earned run averages. Ideally, adults who guide youngsters as they become ballplayers would also draw their attention to the connection between baseball and higher math.
We should not wait for Major League Baseball to do all the things necessary to expose more Black kids to the game. We can all create opportunities to take a Black kid to their first Major League Baseball game. Who knows—you might launch the career of a future major leaguer.
Zachary W. Carter is a former NYC corporation counsel, former U.S. attorney, and current EDNY chair of the Legal Aid Society of NYC.