In leading off Game 1 of the World Series, Dexter Fowler made history.
Being the first Chicago Cub on the field made him the man who officially broke the team’s 71-year-old World Series drought, and the first African-American to play in the Fall Classic in a Cubs uniform.
But the milestone highlighted the steady decline in African-American major league players. U.S.-born black players composed just 8.3 per cent of opening day rosters in 2015, and a conservative think tank announced last week it had identified a key factor driving the trend: Single parenthood.
A study published by the Austin Institute for The Study of Family and Culture points out that 70 per cent of African-American children are born to unmarried mothers, up from roughly five per cent in 1947, when big league baseball integrated. That rise coincides with slumping baseball enrollment among black youth, largely because kids with absent dads aren’t introduced to the sport, say the authors of the study, titled “Called Out at Home.”
But experts on race and baseball say the research is way off base, especially given that MLB’s first two African-American players, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, grew up in female-headed households.
They contend the bigger problem is that low-cost, high-level baseball has vanished from African-American communities.
“There were people there to play ball with,” says Louis Moore, a sports history professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
“There’s a community development aspect of that. There’s youth ball . . . There’s a pipeline.”
The report went public during a World Series fraught with racial subplots. While Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo logo and mascot are widely criticized as racist, media outlets framing this World Series as “Chicago’s first” since 1945 rattled a deep Chicago fault line — the long-running, race and class-conscious rivalry between its North and South Sides.
Largely white Wrigleyville hasn’t seen the World Series in seven decades, but the South Side, where many residents are black, saw the White Sox win the World Series in 2005. The Cubs last appeared in the World Series before MLB integrated.
“It’s great just being here in the World Series, but to add that aspect of it definitely makes it that much better,” Fowler told reporters last week. “That’s when it really sinks in, and it’s like, `You are the first African-American to play in a World Series as a Cub.’ . . . It’s crazy to even think about that.’’
Those undercurrents flow into a broader discussion about the Major League Baseball’s on-field demographics. Every season between 1973 and 1988 African-Americans composed at least 17 per cent of MLB rosters, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
While black players from Latin America abound, most research categorizes those players as Latino rather than African-American, a U.S.-born demographic whose MLB presence has shrunk since the 1990s.
Recently the numbers have dipped so low that even the Austin Institute, an all-white think tank whose staff includes sports fans, started investigating. Their research told them the changing structure of black families had also transformed baseball. Fewer fathers at home means fewer opportunities for kids to play catch or practise hitting.
“It’s a hypothesis, but I think it fits,” says the Austin institute’s director and study co-author Kevin Stuart.
“You’re going to need a lot of practice and you need at least one other person. We think the data is telling us . . . that dad is the best person to make that commitment, with the kind of regularity and depth that you see.”
But other experts point out a pair of glaring flaws in the study’s logic.
First, single parenthood hasn’t hampered black enrollment in other mainstream sports. Last season 69 per cent of NFL players were African-American, up from 52 per cent in 1985.
Sport historian Adrian Burgos Jr. traces baseball’s demographic shift to the mid-1980s, when travel teams overtook high school teams as the chief incubator of elite baseball players.
Burgos attended Blanche Ely High School, a football powerhouse in a working-class section of Pompano Beach, Fla., that produced NFL players like cornerback Al Harris and linebacker Henri Crockett. Burgos stopped playing high level baseball when it grew too expensive, and says costs prompted classmates with multisport talent to focus on football.
That scenario, he says, played out communities across the U.S. where black baseball talent once flourished.
“Who funds high school football? Taxpayers. It’s highly subsidized,” says Burgos, a University of Illinois professor and author of three books on race and baseball.
“Parents (fund) travel baseball. Therein lies a huge difference, and why you can’t just look at the presence of fathers. You have to look at economic class if you want to understand the decline of African-Americans in baseball.”
Others see in the study a familiar scapegoating — of black people in general and women specifically — that collapses under scrutiny.
When early season NFL TV ratings trailed last year’s numbers, Forbes declared viewers had dumped football over protests during the national anthem by Colin Kaepernick and African-American players. Further research revealed changing audience habits and an oversupply of games are among several factors depressing NFL viewership.
Similarly, births of white American children to unmarried mothers have tripled since 1980, accompanying a slow leak of white players from the major leagues. In 2015 white players composed 58.8 per cent of major league rosters, down from 70 per cent in 1986.
Yet no one has published a study blaming the trend on absent white fathers. Somehow only black parents bear that burden.
“A lot of kids made it without two-parent household because there was a community in place to push them to baseball in the 1950s and ’60s,” Moore says.
To buttress his point Moore points to a 1958 edition from the Michigan Chronicle, a Detroit-based paper covering the African-American community. The sports section features a call to boycott the Detroit Tigers over the club’s reluctance to sign black players, and a story about a registration drive by a local kids’ baseball league.
Organized by moms.