Today's column title was taken (well, mostly) from a quote by Mark Twain that was written in his autobiography. He attributed that well known remark to Benjamin Disraeli, a prime minister of Great Britain in the 1800s.
The point of the quote is that you can take statistics, line them up, stack them or move them around and prove just about anything to anyone, with the actual truth of the situation often being of little concern.
While waiting for an oil change, I had the chance to peruse the weekend edition of USA Today, and there on the front page -- was a sports story. Not on the sports page, but a sports story on the front page of America's only national newspaper.
The story was centered around the fact that only 8 percent of the players currently on the rosters of the 30 major league baseball teams are black. Even more shocking, to the writer anyway, was that less than 2 percent of major league pitchers are dark skinned. The thrust of the article seemed to think that these facts are an indictment of perhaps the whole American society.
The article concluded that with regards to major league pitching, black Americans are being excluded -- excluded -- from half the jobs in professional baseball. The story blamed ingrained stereotyping and the "fact" that major league teams invested more money in white players than in blacks. I gathered from the story than American society in general was somehow plotting to limit the role of black Americans in the most American of sports, baseball.
Do I believe any of the premises of said article? Nein, nyet, non and a big NO!
In order to have a lot of black players in the major leagues, you would have to have a lot of black players in the collegiate ranks or coming out of high school. To have a lot of players in those ranks, you would need to have a lot of black players in the little league and youth programs. This just isn't happening anymore.
Actually, to boost black participation in the sport, Major League Baseball has been sponsoring clinics in black communities around the country, and have put money into developing league for black kids, but these efforts have not had much effect. A group in Cleveland recently put together a program to have a youth league in the black community and rounded up enough coaches and readied enough fields to have a league of six teams. After a recruiting drive, a total of 13 kids signed up and the league died before it was born.
The number of black professionals pretty much mirrors the participation of black youth in organized baseball. In the 1970s, major leagues had more than 20 percent of their players black, and about 20 percent of black youths were in the game. Now both numbers are in the single digits. Is it because we are a racist and oppressive society?
Well, maybe, it is because there has been a spectacular rise in the numbers of black youth playing football and basketball with both sports squeezing their talent away from other sports. When I was a kid, we all played football, then basketball, then baseball. Today's young athlete is encouraged to play just one sport to better improve their chances for success in that sport.
Youth basketball leagues no longer have a season. There are kids who play the sport just about year around. All you have to have is a basketball and a hoop to practice. If you have the talent, chances are that some traveling AAU team will pick you up. To have a team, you only need six or seven players to make it work.
When I was coaching high school basketball in Birmingham, Ala., in the late 1970s, we had a game with Holy Family High School in Bessemer. The school had several professional baseball players attend there, most notably Willie McCovey of San Francisco fame. Since that time, a lot of basketball phenoms have come out of that school and when I visited their campus, I couldn't help but notice the seemingly endless rows of basketball goals behind and around the school.
Spillman College, a historically black institution, had a baseball team last year composed of 34 white athletes and one black. Another black institution, Howard University, dropped their team for lack of interest. Clearly, the reason there are less black major league players because there are just less players
Comedian Chris Rock had a bit about how boring baseball is. Slow and much too mannerly. While Rock professed to being a Mets fan, he acknowledged that the great majority of the black community really doesn't care about it.
I worked at school that was about 40 percent black a long time ago and a government official criticized the school for having too few teachers of color on the faculty. It didn't seem to matter that not a single black teacher had ever applied there.
A combination of disinterest, lack of time and participation in other things had led to the decline in the numbers of black baseball players. Am I concerned or worried about this situation?
Martin Luther King once remarked that we ought to be judged not for the color of our skin but the content of our character. When I see St. Louis take the field, I don't see Asians, Latinos or white. I just see Cardinals. The Cardinals' only black player, Jason Heyward, left this season to join the Cubs. I hated to see him go, not because he was black, but because he was a good player -- and the fact that he went to the CUBS!
People ought to be allowed to just do what they want to do, not to alter they lives to make some statistician happy. I encourage kids to play whatever sport they would like to, and to do their best.
I have noticed that there is a disproportional number of Latinos on the MLB rosters. The reason for that is for a large number of Latin American countries, baseball is the THE sport, sometimes the only sport. Logically, their best athletes get into it.
I enjoy major league baseball and watch it as often as I can, and I rarely watch the NFL and I only watch the NBA since the rise of Stephen Curry. Of course, I'm 63 and remember a time when baseball truly was America's sport.
America is not nearly a bad or racist place as a lot of media folks would have you believe.
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Editor's note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports on 04/20/2016