Baby boomers who grew up playing and loving baseball had among their heroes Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams, Ernie Banks, Bob Gibson, Willie Stargell, Joe Morgan and Reggie Jackson — Black players all.
Today, only 6.1% of players on opening-day rosters of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams were Black, the smallest percentage in the league since 1955, which was eight years after Jackie Robinson shattered the league’s color line. The highest percentage of Blacks reached in MLB history was 18.7% in 1981.
At the start of this season, as Bob Nightengale wrote in USA Today earlier this year, five teams didn’t have a single Black player, and nine teams had just one.
The Atlanta Braves, for whom Aaron played and on which team he broke baseball’s all-time home run record in 1974, have one Black player, Michael Harris II, who grew up in the Atlanta area and was last year’s National League Rookie of the Year.
Pundits have expressed various opinions as to why this dearth has occurred in what came to be known as America’s Pastime, and we’ll talk about a few of those. But what prompted this subject was a blurb in Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly’s recent weekly newsletter, in which he mentioned he had thrown out the first pitch for Chattanooga’s season of Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI).