This Friday is the 69th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball.
While his legacy as a trailblazing athlete and advocate is certainly worthy of reflection, it’s also important to note that the statistics regarding African American involvement in the sport are moving in the wrong direction, on the field and off.
According to the 2015 MLB Racial and Gender Report Card by the Institute for Diversity in Ethics in Sports, only 8.3 percent of the players on opening day rosters in 2015 were African American. Thirty years ago, that number was close to 20 percent.
This year, there are only two African American managers in MLB — Dusty Baker of the Washington Nationals and Dave Roberts of the Seattle Mariners. While this is an increase of one over last year, it’s a sharp decline from 2002, when there were eight African American managers in the league.
The statistics get more dire the longer you look at them. According to USA Today, there 19 major league teams with two or fewer African Americans on the entire team. Three teams — the Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Angels, and Colorado Rockies — don’t have a single black player on their roster.
Furthermore, African Americans comprise just 1.6 percent of major league pitchers.
Officials within Major League Baseball are working to improve the issue. In 2013, the league launched an On-Field Diversity Task Force to try and improve the pipeline, and recently it named Tyrone Brooks the senior director of the new Front Office & Field Staff Diversity Pipeline. Last year, the first round of the MLB draft had the highest percentage of African Americans selected in 24 years, and many clubs are starting programs to reach out to African American children in their communities.
The Nationals Built A Gleaming Baseball Field In A Struggling Community. Can It Really Help Black…On a picturesque early spring afternoon, one that seemed tailor-made for baseball, a group of 9- and 10-year-old boys…thinkprogress.orgBut while re-establishing a pipeline is good, this is also an institutional problem. The league has no African American majority owners, and only three African American minority owners. There is one African American executive vice president, one general manager, and zero CEOs or presidents. Simply put, there aren’t enough African Americans in hiring positions to really make a difference.
“There are [African American candidates] that are out there are not even getting a sniff,” Baker told the Washington Post. “I think about Jackie Robinson, and there’s probably times Jackie wouldn’t be pleased right now very much.”