Too few black players in baseball? Having a hard time seeing it

Hate Mail: If he didn't hate Duke, he does now

Show me a liberal cause, and I can get on board. Our first black president? I can vote for that. Health insurance for all? I can help pay for it. Gun control? I can support it.

Outrage because there aren't enough blacks in baseball?

I ... can't.

Hank Aaron has been vocal about what he perceives as a lack of blacks in baseball. (US Presswire)

I can't get on board. I can't get outraged. Because I can't agree with the premise. There is neither a statistically relative paucity of blacks in baseball nor a conspiracy to run blacks out of the game. And there damn sure isn't a lack of effort to get more blacks into the big leagues. Any talk to the contrary is a hoax, a lie, or simply delusional. Is that clear? Even today, the 63rd anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in 1947, I can't get worked up over this issue other than to say this:

All this whining is getting on my nerves.

The whining comes from big-name baseball people, too. I don't mean fan whining, or media whining. I mean, Hank Aaron whining. Torii Hunter whining. Gary Sheffield and Orlando Hudson. Whining.

Enough. It sounds ridiculous. And I'll start with this fact right here: Roughly 12 percent of the U.S. population is African-American. Roughly 10 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are African-American. That is what we call a statistical wash. But that's not what Hank Aaron calls it. He calls it a problem.

"It dampens my spirit when I come up to spring training and I look at the kids -- I'm not talking about tomorrow, I'm talking about right now -- and don't see any black kids," Aaron told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. "And this is a scene that you see all over the major leagues. This is not only with the Braves. You can go to any ballclub and you see the same thing. ... Something needs to be done about it."

Hank Aaron played through some of the nastiest racism this country's sports landscape has ever seen. When he was a kid, major league baseball was segregated. And then in 1973, when he was closing in on Babe Ruth's career home run record, Aaron received horrific mail from racists, including death threats. His daughter received threatening phone calls. Aaron finally hired a bodyguard.

Hank Aaron speaks from the heart when he speaks of race in baseball, but that doesn't mean he's correct when he laments the number of blacks in baseball by saying "something needs to be done about it." Something is being done. It has been done for more than two decades, when Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (R.B.I.) -- mindful that the black population is centered in metropolitan areas -- was founded in South Central Los Angeles in 1989.

It's true, baseball has lost traction with inner-city youth, but don't blame baseball. Blame Easton, which charges $300 for an aluminum bat. Blame Mizuno, which charges $100 for a glove. Nike cleats are $75. A Rawlings baseball is $13. Batting helmets, catcher's gear ... it adds up. Plus to play baseball, you need a large field. See many large fields in the inner city?

Basketball is more of a city game, and it's a year-round sport. It's more affordable, too. One pair of sneakers, and you're good to go. Someone else will have a ball. Asphalt courts are everywhere. And there are more than 300 Division I schools offering 13 full scholarships apiece to high school basketball players. Baseball teams can divide a maximum of 11.7 scholarships among 27 players, meaning that if you want to play college baseball, you'll need to spend at least half of a small fortune on tuition, books, room and board. Basketball is a better financial bet, and easier to practice. If a kid has a basketball, he can be alone and still work on his game. A baseball player, alone, might as well read a book.

Which brings me back to the R.B.I. program, which does what it can to keep baseball alive in urban areas. Over the years, MLB teams have drafted more than 170 R.B.I. kids, including nine in 2009. It works, and here's why: Since 1989, with MLB and its teams contributing more than $30 million in seed money alone, R.B.I. youth leagues have sprouted in more than 200 cities.

The other side would argue that baseball has spent much more money developing talent in Latin America than in this country. And the other side would be right. As of 2008, 28 of the 30 MLB teams owned a baseball academy in the Dominican, with new academies there costing in the neighborhood of $10 million apiece. That's a lot more money than has been spent on the R.B.I. Program, but at the same time, life in Latin America doesn't compare to life in the United States. Prospects in Dominican camps often require food to eat, a bed to sleep and basic health and dental care that might have been unavailable to them previously.

Those costs add up. Still, baseball is spending more money than ever to develop less affluent talent in the United States. In addition to the R.B.I. programs, MLB also has opened two Urban Youth Academies -- free, year-round baseball camps in this country, patterned as day versions of the live-in academies in Latin America -- in Los Angeles and Houston, with another planned for Miami. MLB and its clubs have given each academy $600,000 and set them up with land, office space, fields, dugouts, even lights. Baseball, to the inner city. For free. Year-round.

But Hank Aaron says "something needs to be done." As if $30 million spent in 200 cities on 100,000 kids, plus those three Urban Youth Academies, doesn't count.

I'm starting to get angry, but I'm also starting to get nervous. This is a scary topic, almost an untouchable one. But I'm touching it because I can't sit back and watch current and former players play the race card so brazenly, without the hand to back it up.

I'm talking about Twins second baseman Orlando Hudson, who basically told Yahoo! Sports this week that racism was keeping Jermaine Dye unemployed this season.

Never mind that Jermaine Dye is keeping Jermaine Dye unemployed this season. He turned down $3 million from the Cubs and another offer from the Nationals and broke off talks with the Brewers. No matter. Hudson didn't explicitly say the word racism in his conversation with Yahoo! baseball writer Jeff Passan, but he didn't have to. Not when he said this:

"A guy like Jermaine Dye can't get a job. A guy like Gary Sheffield, a first-ballot Hall of Famer, can't get a job," Hudson told Passan. "We both know what it is. You'll get it right. You'll figure it out. I'm not gonna say it because then I'll be in [trouble]."

Sheffield is 41 years old, he made $14 million last season and, like Dye, he won't work for relative peanuts, and as a topper, he refused to play a game last season when the Mets decided not to offer a contract extension. Other than that, he's the ideal employee. If I could make one of those rolling eyeball things, I'd do it here.

Hudson says racism is keeping older black players like Dye and Sheffield out of the game, but he's wrong. Age is keeping older black players out of the game -- age and salary. It's keeping older white players out of the game, too. Jim Edmonds and Paul Lo Duca didn't play in 2009 because they couldn't get contracts. Brian Giles, who hit .306 as recently as 2008 and earned $9 million in 2009, had to swallow his pride and accept a minor league contract worth roughly 5 percent of his 2009 salary just to get into spring training this season with the Dodgers.

Other unsigned -- but not retired -- veterans in April included David Weathers, Jason Isringhausen, Joe Crede, Darin Erstad and Braden Looper. Isringhausen and Erstad haven't gone down without a fight, each of them taking a 90 percent pay cut to stay in the game in recent years. As for Looper, he won 14 games in 2009. Weathers allowed less than a hit per inning in 68 appearances. Out of work, both of them. Why? They're expensive, and they're old. It's not racism. It's economics.

Last season, according to Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, just six players over the age of 36 received 400 at-bats: Garret Anderson, Chipper Jones, Craig Counsell, Mike Cameron, Melvin Mora and Raul Ibanez. Two of those players are black. Two are white. Two are Latin American. If there's racism in that statistic, I'm not smart enough to find it.

Latent racism is hard to pinpoint, but the only blatant racism I see in baseball has come out of the mouths of Hunter and Sheffield. Hunter says teams court Latin American players, not black players, to fill some sort of racial quota on the cheap. But, Hunter said of players like Edgar Renteria and Albert Pujols, "They're not us. They're impostors."

Sheffield called Dodgers manager Joe Torre a racist, and when it was pointed out that one of Torre's favorite players in New York was Derek Jeter, Sheffield said this about the biracial Yankees shortstop: Jeter "ain't all the way black."

Latin-American blacks are impostors? Derek Jeter isn't black enough? Wow. I'm not sure if there's textbook racism at work in baseball -- but there's an awful lot of irony here.

Meanwhile, Aaron sees hope in Braves rookie Jason Heyward, a young black slugger with tremendous potential. Heyward, says Aaron, "can mean an awful lot to what ails baseball."

That's weird. I didn't know baseball was sick.