Reacting to this story, Volokh Conspiracy asks Should We Worry About the Declining Percentage of African-American Players in Major League Baseball?
The statistics that are supposedly worrying, to the point of being a near-crisis (”lost a whole generation”), are that 8.2 percent of ballplayers are black. This is versus their proportion of the general population that is 12.7 percent. Now, let’s ignore the fact that (as Volokh points out) what is being counted as ‘black’ seems to leave out many non-American ballplayers who, if they were American, would be called ‘black’. And let’s just imagine an ideal utopian world in which there were “enough” black (American) ballplayers to make the pundits shut up satisfied.
The fact is that there are 25 roster spots per team; so, the ideal improvement would mean that instead of each team having 2 black ballplayers on average (8.2 percent of 25) in our current crisis, there would be 3 black ballplayers per team (12.7 percent of 25).
So I guess the idea is: 2 per team = crisis. 3 per team = Dr. King’s dream. The tragedy, therefore, is that each major league team has a ‘missing black’. If you’re a San Francisco Giants fan, this means there’s a roster spot going to some white guy - let’s say, Erick Threets - when it should be going to a black guy. If a black guy had that roster spot instead of Erick Threets, baseball would be just fine. Erick Threets = emblematic of the decline of baseball. A black guy sitting in the bullpen instead = health of baseball.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Some of Volokh’s commenters try to take a more rational approach and claim the reason we should think all this is a problem because blacks are a market, and (supposedly) baseball should be wringing their hands with anxiety over losing a significant number of black fans, and thereby losing revenue. (Note: there’s no solid reason for thinking this is true. In fact it’s kind of insulting - the premise is that black people will only pay to watch other black people doing things.)
Now again, let’s try to put that in numerical terms. Presumably, blacks, being roughly 1/8th of the population, are (or were, in the golden age of blacks-liking-baseball) approx. 1/8th of baseball’s fans. Now let’s say that with fewer blacks playing (33% fewer), there are fewer black fans accordingly (how many? well let’s just say it’s proportional, so 33% fewer).
But anyway, under these assumptions baseball would have lost 33% of a 1/8th segment of its prior fan base, or….somewhere around 4%.
CRISIS! BASEBALL SHOULD BE TERRIFIED!
Or perhaps not. Is it not possible for baseball to make up that 4% from other segments of the population? Or am I supposed to double- or triple-count the black fans because they’re baseball’s Most Important Fans? Is the loss of a black baseball fan worth the same as the loss of three white fans? ten?
Not to sound cynical, but were black baseball fans particularly wealthy? Spent a LOT of money on games, paraphernalia, etc.? Is that it? Is that why baseball should weep over the loss of this particular ~4% segment?
For some reason, harping on baseball is a favorite pastime of the left and of the politically correct. Baseball seems to just really strike a nerve in some people, and they need to take it down a notch. I will never understand why, but the resulting illogic and bullcrap that gets spewed as a result never ceases to amuse me.
