October 29th, 2005 at 1:37 am
The Houston Astros weren’t black enough, and baseball isn’t black enough, deplores Joe Morgan.
Can we not be satisfied that between the years of 1953 and 2005, teams had at least one black player on a team? Given that 9% of the MLB rosters are black, that’s saying something.
(tongue-in-cheek here) I can understand someone crying racism after Morgan Ensberg was repeatedly allowed to stand the batter’s box with his deer-in-the-headlights stare and uncertain batting stances. Surely someone could have substituted for him. (end tongue-in-cheek)
Astros general manager Tim Purpura agrees.
“I think it’s a huge, huge problem for Baseball,” he said. “The pool of African-American players just isn’t there. And as baseball becomes more college-oriented in its draft, there aren’t a lot of players to pick.
“The African-American athletes are going into other sports,” he said.
I can remember another “white sport” in another time—basketball. Did they shed their whiteness through quotas and calculation? Or did they instead just happen to receive talents like Dr. J., Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Oscar Robertson, etc.? A 10-foot rim knows no skin color. Now we have complaints that basketball may have too much hip-hop, so we have to have a dress code. How far we’ve come!
Even Marge Schott hired Deion Sanders.
Racism has its own consequences. If the Astros were indeed racist, they limited themselves in the talent they selected from, and they got beat by a team without that self-imposed limitation. I’m sure they could have used Juan Uribe.
I’m more inclined to believe that we’ve just witnessed a statistical anomaly being used to spend money for advertising campaigns and programs to entice more people of a certain skin color. The winners? The people who put on the programs—not the players who would normally be stuck in AAA-ball or playing a different sport, and certainly not the fans whose ticket prices would be raised to pay for such activities.
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