Remembering Halberstam

News & Observer Editors Blog

To clarify the statistic about black baseball players mentioned above: the report from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport says that 8.4% of major league baseball players are AMERICAN, non-Hispanic blacks.

American black athletes, it seems, have moved from baseball to other sports because of the programs available to them in their youth, or perhaps because of community preferences for football and basketball or the increasing number of Michael Jordan and Warren Moon and Donovan McNabb role models.

The news is not that black people are being pushed out of baseball, as the striking decline might appear to indicate, but that people from other cultures now make up more of the player pool. There are also significantly fewer WHITE Americans playing major league baseball now, with 29.4% of players considered Hispanic, which could be black or white, American or not. However, the bulk of them are from Latin American countries, including Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and many of them would be considered black by any standard.