We know this much about the day Jackie Robinson was born — Jan. 31, 1919: There were no black players in major league baseball. There wasn’t even a formal, organized Negro League on that date; that didn’t happen for another year. On Robinson’s 28th birthday, in 1947, there still weren’t any in the majors. (He was promoted by the Dodgers some two months later.)
So when he came into the world — the rigidly, legally segregated world African-Americans functioned in at that time — seeing black players at the highest level of the national pastime was beyond a dream and bordered on reckless fantasy. Everybody knew it, whether they accepted it or not, and that included Robinson himself.
“I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime. I began to wonder why I should dedicate my life to a career where the boundaries for progress were set by racial discrimination,’’ he wrote in his 1972 autobiography, “I Never Had It Made,’’ about his decision to play in the Negro leagues in 1944.
Today, as baseball celebrates the 100th anniversary of Robinson’s birth, that world is extinct. There are no legal or extralegal barriers to any player of any race or ethnicity playing in the big leagues. The legacy and contributions of Robinson and the generations of legends that followed him are set in stone.
The present and future for African-American players, though, are not.
If they were, these numbers would not be slapping everyone involved in the sport up to the commissioner’s office in the face: MLB officially counts the percentage of black players in the majors in 2018 at 8.4 percent. That’s the highest percentage since 2012. It’s been tabulated by various sources in the low 7 percent range within the past decade. That's significantly lower than in the peak years of the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
And that’s barely above the 6.7 percent in baseball in 1956 — Robinson’s final big-league season, when three franchises still had never signed a black player. According to USA Today , last season began with one franchise (the Padres) having no black players on their roster, and eight other teams (including the Dodgers) having just one.
This is nothing that hasn’t been discussed before. This year is the 30th anniversary of baseball's RBI program (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities), and its name speaks for itself: The numbers in the minor leagues and colleges were starting to fall, and within a decade, the fallout had hit big-league rosters. More recently, it's been talked about in connection with a milestone date or occasion related to Robinson, such as the annual day in his honor every April 15.
The 100th anniversary brings it full circle.
The questions don’t have easy or convenient answers, although, to its credit, MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred have gotten much better at trying to answer them. But one of the questions embedded in their efforts is this: What are the odds that a black child born in the United States exactly 100 years after Robinson was — on Jan. 31, 2019 — winds up playing baseball for a living?
Plenty of questions spring from that: Does he (or she) want to play? Does the game want them to? Do they have every opportunity to, all the access they need, and if not, how do they get it?
And if they have it and don’t want it, why not, after the decades of love-hate relations, the rollercoaster of attraction and rejection, African-Americans and baseball have had with each other?
The facts tell conflicting stories, and so do the anecdotes. Among the most recent mixed signals: This year, the latest MLB youth baseball academy is scheduled to be completed, in the Bronx, with collaboration between the city, state, baseball and even Alex Rodriguez (a $750,000 donation in 2016 when the plans were announced). When planned academies in Chicago and San Francisco open, that will bring the total number of such urban-based academies to 12. More than 160 draft picks have come through the academies since the first opened in 2006, according to MLB.
The youth-academy concept took shape during the Bud Selig tenure. It's cleary accelerated under Manfred, and gone into overdrive the past four years, since baseball focused even more sharply on youth development and brought in former Angels general manager Tony Reagins as the department's executive vice president in 2015.
The efforts are bearing fruit at every level, Reagins told Sporting News, from increased participation at the grassroots level to the rise of players toward the majors.
"Our goal is to continue to hold on to what we've built here. It's not something we take lightly,'' he said.
On the other hand, Kyler Murray, taken ninth overall in last June’s draft by the A’s and tabbed for potential transformational stardom in a sport that needs his brand of it, entered his name in the NFL draft a few weeks ago. Still-dominant ratings and revenue aside, the NFL is struggling with an image problem, over long-term health issues, a persistent struggle to hire non-white head coaches and executives, and the fight over players being blackballed for their protests against institutional racism.
Given a choice between that and an unquestionably safer sport with better long-term financial prospects and aggressive efforts to heal a rift with the black community, Murray is still leaning hard toward football. The optics do not help baseball.
Some of the reasons for the skidding numbers since the peaks of the 1970s, '80s and '90s (steadily in the high teens; the commonly cited 25-27 percent has since been discarded once American-born and Latin-born players were categorized separately) have been addressed — by the increase in the academies in American cities, for instance. They removed a major, tangible obstacle: resources for and access to baseball. A game that was increasingly defined by elite, expensive travel teams is gradually being returned to the masses.
"That's our job — all these 'no, no, no's' to transition them to 'yes, yes, yes,'' Reagins said. "To take part in it, you just have to have a desire to be a part of it.''
In addition to the nine U.S.-based entities operating now, every MLB franchise already has an academy in the Dominican Republic, continuing a practice dating to the 1970s.
Those Latin academies were an early target, in the early 2000s, of those decrying the decrease of black players: The sport simply prioritized (or exploited) the economics of the Latin-American talent pool at the expense of home-grown black players, who often literally had no place to play and gravitated to other, more accessible sports.
However, the fact that so many have stayed in other sports, generation after generation, despite the institutional problems those sports have presented, is still a high wall for baseball to scale.
Meanwhile, the perception feeds on itself, even with the aforementioned conflicting elements. The American League MVP last year was Mookie Betts, of the World Series champion Red Sox, who also had David Price and Jackie Bradley Jr., among plenty of other players of color. The team they defeated, the Dodgers? They had only one black American-born player, Matt Kemp. Their manager, Dave Roberts, is of African-American and Japanese nationality.
For what it’s worth, Roberts is also the only African-American manager in the majors. That’s one more than when Robinson famously demanded that baseball start hiring them, in a speech at the 1972 World Series. It’s another fact that’s tough for baseball to reconcile when selling itself, even when up against the NFL.
As for the Red Sox, the fury surrounding a fan in Fenway Park calling the Orioles’ Adam Jones the n-word was just two seasons ago. And the reaction by Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia has resonated to this day: “There’s 62 of us. We all know. When you go to Boston, expect it.’’
Besides the unshakable reputation Boston and the Red Sox have — dating back at least to an embarrassing token tryout for Robinson himself decades earlier — the implication that the number of black players is so small that they all know each other and can quote the exact total, does not do baseball any favors.
Baseball has given every indication that it knows it’s an uphill fight, that getting defensive about the questions was not and is not helpful, and that it understands the value of both reaching every possible pool of talent and embracing black participation. Reagins pointed to the pockets of baseball passion scattered across the country among black communities and noted that in recent years, the "fragmentation and disconnect" is starting to dissolve. The overriding goal, he said, is "to bridge the gap, create that connectivity, and for Major League Baseball to keep facilitating that connectivity."
MLB shows no interest in simply conceding to the notion that this segment of the American population has found something better to do.
Certainly not the segment of the population coming into the world on or around Jan. 31, 2019. This is not what baseball wants to explain or excuse 100 years from now.