Virtue Signaling MLB Spends $$ In DR But Not In Poor America
By Joe Guzzardi
With a single stroke of his pen, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred rewrote a century of baseball history. Before the ink dried, the Pittsburgh Crawfords’ and the Homestead Grays’ Josh Gibson replaced Ty Cobb as baseball’s all-time batting champion, took over Babe Ruth’s career slugging average record, and is now officially the last player to hit over .400 in a season. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when baseball’s suits, a 17-man, John Thorn-led commission, met six times to evaluate, despite incomplete data, incorporating Negro Leagues’ statistics into the existing record book. Notwithstanding Sabermetricians’ best efforts, they only located about 75% of Negro Leagues’ box scores.
The commission marginalized icons Cobb, Ruth and Ted Williams. Cobb, the former career batting average leader, won 12 titles during his 11,440 at bats compared to Gibson’s 2,164. Displaced also is Ruth, who amassed his .690 slugging title in four-times Gibson’s plate appearances, 10,628 to 2,526. Yet Gibson with his .718 mark, post-Manfred’s edict, now holds Ruth’s old title. MLB’s ill-conceived revisions anointed Gibson as the last player to hit over .400 in a single season, .466 in 1943, which displaced Williams’ .406 in 1941. Gibson did not have enough at bats to qualify for the batting title. As ESPN’s black Senior Writer Howard Bryant described Manfred’s ahistorical pronouncement: “The decision was met with great applause, but in addition to being reconciliatory, it was also a spectacular display of historical distortion and institutional arrogance.” An unanswered question that Manfred left hanging: if Gibson established records in 1943, will the April 15th annual Jackie Robinson Day celebration of his 1947 breaking of MLB’s color line be canceled? Confused fans should consider the source. Manfred is a labor lawyer, not a baseball historian
More statistical revisions will come soon; the commission is still digging into decades of Negro Leagues’ games that involve hundreds of players. Questions about which games and feats should count will be endless. Satchel Paige’s 50 no-hitters, the total he insists he hurled, might replace Nolan Ryan’s seven as the new career record. Anything is possible. The commissioners have their computers and their new-fangled analytical methods. But Monte Irvin, who played for the Newark Eagles and the New York Giants, noted the obvious: unless the players compete in the same league, no meaningful parallels can be drawn. Irvin’s on-the-record opinion is that the Negro Leagues, because the teams had shallower pitching staffs, can’t compare to the majors.
Manfred claims that his baseball ideological history makes amends for the terrible biases that kept talented black players out of the major leagues because of their skin color. “Correcting an injustice,” is how Manfred attempted to explain the inexplicable. Beyond the clear fact that the leagues were separate entities, the inherent suggestion that MLB’s stamp of approval validates the Negro Leagues is an insult to Gibson, Paige, Irvin, Robinson and hundreds of others. The Negro Leagues do not need validation.
The commissioner’s gesture does little tangible for the black players’ families that suffered through decades of the shameful treatment and does even less for today’s black kids yearning to reach the major leagues. If MLB wants to do something productive for black youths, it should build a network of baseball camps like those it has spent hundreds of millions to develop in the Dominican Republic. Envision this: Manfred summons the thirty MLB owners and demands that, since baseball is an $12 billion industry, part of that revenue should be allocated to developing U.S. black players.
Originally, MLB promoted the camps as an option to a life spent in the Dominican sugar cane fields. For the few Dominicans who made the big leagues, they could send money home to lift their families out of poverty. But MLB was the big winner because teams could sign several prospects for the same cost to ink one American player. MLB originally paid its academy players little, $600 per month, but the cash plus a green card that would give prospects and their families legal status in the U.S. was too inviting to pass up.
The Pittsburgh Pirates built its first Dominican academy in 2009 and has added to the 52-acre facility every year thereafter. Pirates’ camps have multiple playing fields, cafeterias, classrooms and the most complete weight room among the camps. Pirates’ director of international development Hector Morales called the facility “unparalleled.” Nothing remotely similar exists in the U.S. And while the Dominican Republic offers the advantage of year-round good weather, determined multi-millionaire owners could work around climate handicaps by training in Florida, Texas or California and making use of indoor facilities during the winter months. Owners lack the will to find raw U.S. talent and develop it. The California Winter League, baseball’s first integrated league, played from 1900 to the mid-1940s. The greatest baseball stars competed in the CWL — -Walter Johnson, Cool Papa Bell, Andy Pafko, Bob Elliot, and Jackie Robinson, among others.
Miserly billionaire owners point to the NCAA baseball teams as the best source for future stars. But few blacks can afford college. Consider how Pirates’ great Andrew McCutcheon viewed the challenges for increased black players’ participation in MLB In his 2015 Post-Gazette op-ed, “I Could Have Been Left Behind.” McCutcheon wrote about growing up in Central Florida, poor and unable to get rides to the big showcase tournaments. He envied Dominican players that MLB could, because of the local camps, sign, develop, and nurture. When Cutch wrote his op-ed, Josh Harrison was his only American black teammate. In the decade since Cutch’s op-ed, the only change is that Ke’Bryan Hayes has replaced Harrison as one of two other Pirates’ American blacks. Florida-based The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that African American players represented just 6.2% of players on 2023 MLB opening day rosters down from 7.2% in 2022. The totals were the lowest since the study began in 1991, when 18% of MLB players were African American. Dominican players comprise about 30% of MLB’s active rosters.
McCutcheon suggested that MLB build camps, scout high schools, Pony League, Nebraska’s cornfields and Chicago’s South Side. If MLB wants to “correct an injustice” to African Americans, as Manfred insists, give them an equal opportunity to earn the lucrative contracts that abound in baseball today. Every year, owners wring their hands and shed crocodile tears about its shortage of black players. The penurious owners should put their money where their mouths are. Right now, their money is in the Dominican Republic. The inescapable conclusion: MLB owners use the billions their teams generate from ticket, merchandise, and TV revenue to fund Dominican academies whose players that will eventually displace American kids on the baseball diamond.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com
Virtue Signaling MLB Spends $$ In DR But Not In Poor America
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