Has baseball lost its soul?

 

Why do baseball players spit in their hands? My mother thought that was even more disgusting than the players’ habit of grabbing their groin. I’ve been a baseball fan since I watched Jackie Robinson play live at Ebbets Field as a kid. Recently I had breakfast with an old friend who told me his childhood heroes were all baseball players: Lou Brock, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Bob Gibson, Roy Campanella. I asked him to name one current American black superstar. He said “Aaron Judge” — and struggled to get further. Mookie Betts, Michael Harris II, and Byron Buxton aren’t quite on that level. When I asked him to name a black starting pitcher, he came up empty; David Price has retired and he didn’t think of Hunter Greene.

The numbers back up the impression. Most major league clubs including the Cubs, Padres, Orioles, Phillies, Blue Jays, Mets, Rangers, Red Sox, don’t have a single American black starter. League-wide, American blacks make up only about 6 percent of major league rosters.

An old pattern, repeating?

That decline made me think of boxing, where the same climb-and-fade pattern has played out for a century. John L. Sullivan and the Irish dominated first. Then, in the early twentieth century, ambitious young Jews fighting their way out of poverty producing champions like Joe Choynski, Abe Attell, and Benny Leonard — boxing as a ladder out of the ghetto.

Then the ladder passed to black fighters. George Dixon, a black Canadian, won the bantamweight title in 1890 and became the first black athlete to win a world championship in any sport. Jack Johnson followed, and with him the rise of boxing greats like Archie Moore, Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Evander Holyfield, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Mike Tyson, Joe Louis, Marvin Hagler, Thomas and Johnson himself. Boxing gave black athletes a way out of oppression and a source of pride. 

After them came a wave of Hispanic fighters from Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, mostly in the lighter weight classes. Now Asian boxers are rising in the flyweight, bantamweight, featherweight, and lightweight divisions. Manny Pacquiao, champion in eight different weight classes, may the best of them.

Boxing has always been “the sport of kings” for the downtrodden: whichever group is hungriest and most determined tends to dominate it. So does the fade of black players from baseball mean American blacks are no longer “determined and downtrodden” in the way that pattern requires? Or has the ladder simply moved — to football and basketball?

Latin soul

I don’t think baseball has lost its soul. It’s just changed hands. The first generation of black stars — like the first generation of Latin players such as Roberto Clemente, the first Latino in the Hall of Fame, along with Mariano Rivera, Juan Marichal, Rod Carew, and Orlando Cepeda — played it straight, embracing the game’s staid, all-white traditions rather than disrupting them.

Today’s Latin players are a different story. With their bat flips and showmanship, they’ve brought the flair that earlier generations weren’t allowed to show. Baseball is now a world sport with more and more Asian players but I can’t discern much “soul” in the Asian game. It’s the Latin players — with the dreads, tats, and earrings that Barry Bonds may have started — who bring the flamboyance. Once, a bat flip would get you a fastball at your ear. Now Sports Center tracks bat-flip highlights right alongside home run distance. Latinos have kept the sport fun. Call it Latin soul.

And now soccer. Soccer?

What is really intriguing is that on the US team in the World Baseball Classic there were only two blacks, Aaron Judge and Byron Buxton. But on the US men’s soccer team in the World Cup there are twelve blacks on the roster. I always assumed soccer was a suburban sport for kids whose parents wanted the boys somewhere safer than a football field. So where did all these black players come from?

Has soccer quietly become the new ladder for black youth, the way boxing was and baseball were before it? I doubt it. Pardon me, but soccer is not an inner city sport. Soccer is not offering the same path to advancement that boxing and baseball once did. So if it’s not soccer, and it’s increasingly not baseball, where exactly are we seeing that next generation of black athletic ambition go? That’s the real question the numbers are asking.

So what in the wide world of sports is going on?