If professional baseball had a commissioner, she’d be smiling with Thomas. The Phillies is just one of 54 teams competing in St. Louis this summer, courtesy of RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities). Backed by Major League Baseball, RBI reaches more than 10,000 players across the nation. Next month, St. Louis will host the first RBI World Series. Teams from 11 cities will play on a field of dreams, the 56,000-seat Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals.
Baseball is the one American sport with a storied history of segregation and integration–and one it can’t shake. This week, at the showcase All-Star Game in Baltimore, pickets led by Jesse Jackson will protest the sport’s failure to hire and promote blacks to management positions. But baseball’s estrangement from the African-American community extends far deeper: stretching from the young black ballplayers who no longer fill the majorleague pipeline to the black fans who rarely venture to the ballpark. “Baseball has taken it for granted that we would always have minority anticipation,” says Leonard Coleman, the Major League’s executive director of market development. “We can no longer just say, ‘Here’s baseball, come on out.’ We’ve got to take baseball to the people.”
Today virtually any big baseball story can serve as a reminder of the game’s failures to nurture its roots in the black community. For example, at a time when baseball has been memorializing Roy Campanella, the major’s first great black catcher, there is not a single African-American starter at that critical quarterbacking position. At last year’s AllStar Game there were about half as many African-Americans playing as a decade ago, and they were outnumbered by Hispanics.
“It’s very different than when I was growing up with the Hanks and the Willies,” says Detroit Tigers star Cecil Fielder. When he’s not playing first base, Fielder is the spokesman for Coca-Cola’s Homers for America program that this year will donate $645,000 to rebuild inner-city ball fields. “Now,” he says, “everybody in the inner city wants to be like Mike.” Little wonder when even Ballpark Franks chose Michael Jordan, who doesn’t play in a park, as its pitchman. That endorsement, says Hall of Fame second baseman turned ESPN broadcaster Joe Morgan, is “an incredible slap in the face to the game
The accumulation of selfinflicted slaps-bumbling owners, faltering TV contracts, shrunken endorsements-may have finally awakened the game’s management. On race, at least, baseball is trying to do the right thing, from the decision to extend health benefits to about 130 surviving Negro Leagues veterans and widows to the “Catch the Fever” promo finally catching a rap beat. The sandlot RBI program was the brainchild of John Young, now a Florida Marlins scout, who was dismayed that youngsters in South-Central Los Angeles weren’t playing baseball anymore. When five years ago he inquired why, they dismissed the game as boring"a white man’s sport.” “These kids weren’t going to the ballpark so they didn’t really understand the game,” he says. “Now all the kids have baseball cards. We have definitely created fans.”
The Atlanta Braves are eager to convert some homeboys into home fans. In a city that is 60 percent black, the Braves were embarrassed two years ago that blacks bought only 4 percent of the tickets. “It’s pretty much a white crowd out here, and ballplayers notice that,” says Braves third baseman Terry Pendleton, one of the team’s prominent black stars. With a new multicultural marketing manager on board, the Braves began to advertise with black-oriented radio stations and publications, to pitch ticket deals to black churches and colleges, and to schedule ballpark events that showed more sensitivity than the famed “tomahawk chop.” Before one game, the Clark-Atlanta University Family chorus sang the black anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Last year blacks bought 8 percent of all the tickets.
Braves multicultural marketing manager Peter Serrano says the effort doesn’t stem from any moral imperative, but rather from business sense. Similarly, the St. Louis Cardinals, noting that black fans represent less than 3 percent of its sales, sent direct-mail solicitations to 3,000 minority–owned or–controlled companies. Says Daniel Farrell, the Cardinals’ group market-development director: “There’s a half-million African-Americans in close proximity to Busch Stadium and we need to focus our attention on them.”
Farrell acknowledges it will take time to lure black fans back to the ballpark. Did blacks stop going, or did some teams leave them behind? Two Boston University professors, Alan Sager and Arthur Culbert, recently studied why 10 of baseball’s original 16 teams relocated, to a new stadium or city, between 1950 and 1970. The critical indicator of whether a team moved was not stadium age, team record, or even attendance–but the racial composition of the neighborhood. Teams that left went from areas that had an average black population of 49 percent to ones that were just 16 percent black. Those that stayed put were in neighborhoods that had, on average, a 24 percent black population. (George Steinbrenner ’s desire to move the New York Yankees to Manhattan or New Jersey after 70 years in the Bronx may demonstrate similar discomfort with Hispanic neighborhoods.)
Joe Morgan says that while there are now far fewer ballplayers in the inner city, what talent does exist is unlikely to be found by the white scouting fraternity who are more comfortable patrolling the Oklahoma outback. “A black player’s attitude is always the first thing judged by white scouts,” says Morgan, “and it’s something they don’t begin to understand.” If attitudes don’t keep changing, not just the ball is going to be white.
