Baseball is the greatest sport that has ever existed. It is like chess, but physical. Every move, every decision, every pitch, every at-bat requires strategy. Whether it’s a one-out bunt or an attempt to beat the shift, baseball is just so entertaining to watch.
(Go Boston Red Sox!)
But one leftist columnist wants to bring social justice to the sport.
Writing in The Globe and Mail in a piece titled, “The unbearable whiteness of baseball,” columnist Michael Powell complains that he doesn’t see a lot of black people in attendance. And this is making him angry.
He writes:
I played my version when the Cubs played in the 2016 World Series. Come the fourth inning, I walked from Wrigley Field’s ancient press box to the farthest reaches of right field. My goal was to count every black fan I saw. I found two sitting hard by the right field fence.
Each year, Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports issues a report on racial hiring in baseball. As recently as 2009, baseball had 10 black and Latino managers. Now it has four. There is the tiniest handful of blacks and Latinos in baseball front offices.
Commissioner Rob Manfred loves to talk of pipelines and training initiatives and so on, but he has had remarkably little success in persuading teams and owners to hire more blacks and Latinos.
When I asked Manfred about this, he got snippy. “We’re going to have ebb and flow,” he said.
Not much is flowing. I don’t want to pick on Midwestern teams when my own childhood team, the Mets, is so close at hand and offers such an inviting target. One member of the Mets’ weird three-headed general manager team is Latino, but the rest of the organization is lily white. The team has no black or Latino vice-presidents.
Like Chicago, New York is a majority minority city. Yet you can sit in the stands at Wrigley or Citi Field some nights and it looks like 1955. In Milwaukee the other night, it even sounded like 1955.
Uh, maybe black people just aren’t interested in baseball in the same way that many white people aren’t interested in the NBA.
It’s certainly not about price considering that MLB tickets are the cheapest compared to the NFL, NHL, and NBA.
Are teams purposely prohibiting black people from attending a game? Are schools banning black people from playing the game? Is this guy trying to find a problem that just isn’t there?
In fact, he seems kind of racist because 1) he treats black people like an anomaly (counting them in public?) and 2) MLB is actually quite diverse: it’s made up of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The best players in baseball right now, or at the least most entertaining, are Mike Trout (white), Mookie Betts (black), J.D. Martinez (Hispanic), and Shohei Ohtani (Asian).
Just calm down, Powell, and enjoy the game.
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