Astros Roster Has No Black Players

[GaryMrMets]

Astros Roster Has No Black Players

By BEN WALKER
.c The Associated Press

HOUSTON (AP) - Joe Morgan worries about the face of baseball. Watching the World Series, the Hall of Famer is troubled by what he sees. His old team, the Houston Astros, is down 2-0 to the Chicago White Sox, but it's not their lineup that concerns Morgan. It's their makeup.

The Astros are the first World Series team in more than a half-century with a roster that doesn't include a single black player.

``Of course I noticed it. How could you not?'' Morgan said while the Astros took batting practice before the opener in Chicago. ``But they're not the only ones. There are two or three teams that didn't have any African-American players this year.''

Morgan said it's a predicament and a challenge for Major League Baseball. While more players from around the world are making it to the majors - Japan, Korea, for example - the number of blacks is declining.

``It's a daunting task to get African-American kids into baseball, and I don't see the trend changing,'' he said.

The last World Series team without a black player was the 1953 New York Yankees. It wasn't until 1955 - eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 - that Elston Howard became the first black in Yankee pinstripes.

Black players accounted for just about 9 percent of big league rosters this season.

``We know that we have to work to do,'' Commissioner Bud Selig said Tuesday. ``We'll continue to intensify our efforts. I'm very aware, I'm extremely sensitive about it, and I feel badly about it. But we need to get to work to change things.''

Astros general manager Tim Purpura agrees.

``I think it's a huge, huge problem for baseball,'' he said. ``The pool of African-American players just isn't there. And as baseball becomes more college-oriented in its draft, there aren't a lot of players to pick.

``The African-American athletes are going into other sports,'' he said.

The most recent survey by the NCAA, taken during the 2003-04 season, showed that only 6 percent of Division I baseball players were black. Half of the men's basketball players were black, as were 44 percent of football players.

Houston has a half-dozen Hispanic players - it was the first team to open a baseball academy in Venezuela, about a dozen years ago. Bench coach Cecil Cooper is black.

Outfielders Charles Gipson and Charlton Jimerson, both black, played for the Astros during the regular season.

The White Sox have three black players on their Series roster: Jermaine Dye, Carl Everett and Willie Harris, along with coaches Tim Raines and Harold Baines.

They also have eight Hispanic players and Japanese second baseman Tadahito Iguchi.

``We're diverse because we're looking for the best in talent and character,'' general manager Ken Williams said before the Series started. ``It just happened that way. I could care less what the makeup of the club is as long as it works as a whole.''

Williams is the only black general manager in the majors. A former big league outfielder, he joined the White Sox in 1992 as a scout, confident he could find players in the inner cities. After a year of trying, Williams felt as if he'd failed.

Morgan is disturbed by what he's found, too.

A two-time NL MVP, Morgan helped Cincinnati win two straight championships. In 1976, along with fellow black teammates Ken Griffey, George Foster and Dan Driessen, the Big Red Machine swept a Yankees team that had 10 black players on its roster.

Just 10 years ago, Atlanta and Cleveland each had five black players when they met in the World Series.

In 2003, Derek Jeter and the Yankees lost to Florida. Jeter's father is black and his mother is white; the All-Star shortstop has said he considers himself both black and white.

``There's a perception among African-American kids that they're not welcome here, that baseball is not for inner-city kids,'' Morgan said. ``It's not true, and I hate that the perception is out there.''

10/25/05 18:20 EDT

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

[Timberwolf]

It's an issue for sure and an alarming trend, but these things work in cycles. I think you will see a lot more African-Americans in baseball eventually.

[PopTop]

I've never understood why we're all told to develop color and ethnic blindness, and yet we're constantly bombarded with horse poop like this. Larry Bird gets shellacked by the media a year or so ago for commenting that there weren't a lot of white guys in the NBA, yet baseball is doing something wrong for only having X% of their roster spaces occupied by blacks. It's not supposed to work out exactly proportionate all the time, life just doesn't work that way.

[PissedPrincess]

God forgive me, but if Morgan got hit by a bus I wouldn't cry. It's crap like this that makes people racist. How the eff is it baseball's fault that black kids don't want to play their game?

I don't see them complain about the lack of minorities in Hockey. Oh, that's right, not enough money in Hockey. :hmm:

[Eva]

Who care?

I must be a racist for saying that? :hmm:

Obviously, my view on the issue is I don't care. I think only Morgan and a hand full of people notice that no black player was on the Astros. Consider there's plenty of other ethic group on the Astros, who cares if there isn't one black player on the team? If you're good, you'll be playing MLB, your skin color does not matter. It does not make you a good or bad player, so this is why I really don't care about this issue at all.

I just want to see good baseball players play in MLB. The last thing on my mind is what color their skin is. I hate when people bring up issues like this. I wish the issue with race would just die, but that obviously will never happen since people still can't accept what's different from them. :hmm:

[imgreat95]

i read this in the PPG the other day, and thought i was going to pass out. Who give s a shit?? really??

[PopTop]

First, I don't think Morgan should be chastised here for expressing his views. He'd like to see more folks like him in the game, just as I'd like to see more half-breed Texicans in the game. Everyone wants more folks they can identify with doing well on one avenue or another. The problem here is baseball used to have no other major rivals to talent, and now baseball is taking a backseat to both basketball and football which have become more and more popular. That's the part of the story that Morgan and Aaron and the media as well seem to be missing all the time. Baseball just needs to market itself, period, and not market itself to specific groups of people. Let the game attract new players and fans. Tell the Joe Morgan's and the Hank Aaron's to get their asses out on the streets and do their own recruiting if they think it's so bad. Personally, I don't like the idea of hard-selling the product and twisting arms to get folks to be a fan or a player. Just going to attract a lot of falseness so that some accountant's numbers can look more even.

I thought this was a great article and, yes, part of the reason I liked it was the fact it's written by a black man who appears to agree with me on the whole subject.

Michael Wilbon / Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102802221.html)

Misplaced Fury Over Racism

It seems that all the guys Hank Aaron wants playing for the Astros are apparently playing against Air Force Coach Fisher DeBerry, and neither one of them is happy about it.

While race is an inseparable element in sports, thoughtful discussion of the topic makes some squeamish.


DeBerry looked at black receivers running past his slow and usually white defensive backs and said he wants more fast black kids, so his team has a better chance to win.

Aaron took a look at the National League champion Houston Astros, saw not a single black American and called it "very disturbing." The Astros, Aaron said, should move heaven and earth to have a black American player or two on their team.

Both comments are rather funny when you consider that fewer than 60 years ago, there were no black major leaguers, and fewer than 40 years ago, some of America's biggest college football factories wouldn't consider having a black player, regardless of speed, on campus.

By way of review, let's start with DeBerry, if only because he's in very hot water. He has received a reprimand from the academy, in fact, for saying it seemed to him that African American players run very, very well. DeBerry was quick to add, almost seamlessly, that he would be open to having players of any race who are faster than his kids, but that black kids appeared to be faster.

Then all hell broke loose, and by Wednesday the coach was fighting back tears and saying, "I want everyone to understand that I never intended to offend anyone."

DeBerry has nothing whatsoever to apologize for. I understand that any kind of categorization, especially along racial lines, can be risky. One of DeBerry's former black players (who loves his coach) e-mailed me this week to point out that any such comments put the speaker on a very slippery slope, and that's certainly true.

But our fear of any discussion involving race should not eliminate common-sense observations. Since Jason Sehorn retired from the NFL a season or so ago, how many white starting cornerbacks are there in the NFL? The answer, as far as I can find, is zero. And even if I missed one or two, fact is that a position based largely on speed is 99 percent black in the NFL. That's not the same as making a presumption about the intelligence or character of cornerbacks, black or white. It's fact, jack. DeBerry didn't offer any cultural or empirical evidence about cornerbacks; he just said he would like faster ones, and as the NFL demonstrates, the fastest ones are black. That isn't even debatable.

I've heard some black dissent, but mostly I hear objection being raised by white administrators and media colleagues, a sort of misplaced white liberal guilt, if you ask me. Oh, there's plenty of bigotry out there that needs to be identified, but DeBerry's statements aren't among the top 1,000 on the list.

The coach didn't say his school should lower admissions standards to let in more black students, as Paul Hornung said Notre Dame should do. DeBerry didn't do an Al Campanis and say somebody lacked the necessities (primarily the intellectual necessities) to do a specific task. And he certainly shouldn't be lumped in with the likes of Jimmy the Greek, who gave a drunken anthropology lesson of how the big black buck (to use his words) was mated with the big black slave woman to produce the best athlete.

DeBerry didn't insult any race or ethnic group. He offended some folks who confuse politically incorrect public speaking with bigotry. What I find a hundred times more offensive was when DeBerry hung a banner proclaiming, "I am a member of Team Jesus Christ," in his locker room one day after the academy superintendent announced plans to increase the school's fight against religious intolerance.

Even more misplaced than the fury directed toward DeBerry is Aaron's anger at the Astros for not having any black American players. For the record, the White Sox only had one -- Jermaine Dye -- in their starting lineup Wednesday night when they won the World Series. That's because we, black American men, have turned away from baseball. Overwhelmingly, we've cast our lot with basketball and football, and that's it. Only 9 percent of the players on Major League rosters on Opening Day were black and American. Black and Hispanic? Oh, there are plenty. Approximately 31 percent of major leaguers are identified as being of Latin descent. As for black Americans? The Washington Nationals had two on the Opening Day roster. The Baltimore Orioles had none, zero.

A man who navigated as much overt prejudice in baseball as Aaron did over his 23-year career from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, probably never thought he would live to see a day when young black boys ignored baseball, a day when a higher percentage of blacks play quarterback than play baseball. I don't doubt he is stunned and disappointed and, given his experiences, suspicious of baseball.

But nobody's keeping black folks from playing baseball now, except mostly ourselves. The peer pressure is to give up everything in life for basketball. The percentage of blacks in the minor leagues, reportedly, is smaller than the percentage in the big leagues. But this isn't 1944.

I understand why Aaron finds it "disturbing" because he devoted his life not just to baseball, but to baseball being open. And after fighting and winning that fight, it must kill him that his own people won't walk through the doors he opened.

But what should never be suggested, not by Aaron or anybody else, is that baseball resort to some quota to have more black major leaguers.

How would it go down if somebody suggested two or three spots on every NBA team be reserved for a white player?

Aaron and DeBerry are interested in inclusion, even if they don't articulate it eloquently. Because of people such as them, sports is the closest thing America has to a true meritocracy. Almost always now, the best players prove themselves to be the best players, whether they're black quarterbacks, white cornerbacks or Argentine basketball players.

[Durango53]

I've never understood why we're all told to develop color and ethnic blindness, and yet we're constantly bombarded with horse poop like this.

Well said........ :thumbsup:

Who cares. I want the player or the person that is going to do the best job. I dont care what color he is or anything I just want the best person for the job.,