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African Americans in Baseball

Decent Essays
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Michael Rizzo
Murray, Chass (2004). Game Fights Trend of Fewer Blacks. The New York Times

This article is about the declination of blacks in the game of baseball. It begins by talking about how successful blacks were in baseball from 1981-1997. Blacks such as Tony Gwynn, Tim Raines, and Gary Sheffield were winning National League Batting Titles 16 out of those 17 years. From 1998-2004, only one black player has won the batting title. As a huge baseball fan, I never knew that stat and find it very interesting. The article also entails that black players had won the National League MVP award quite often from 1949-1970. More recently from 1985-2004, black players had won the MVP 11 times, with Barry Bonds winning 6 of the 11. The …show more content…

Coleman was a big reason why the RBI program, which stands for Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities, has become a popular program to grab the attention of blacks at a young age to engage in the game of baseball. This program has produced a number of current Major League Players such as Carl Crawford, Coco Crisp and Wil Nieves. About 190 RBI programs have been started domestically and at military bases around the country. Major League Baseball is also giving Little League Baseball $250,000 a year to expand their leagues to urban programs. They have also constructed a baseball academy in Compton, California to try to duplicate the success baseball has had in influencing Latin American countries to the game. I think that this article, for being almost ten years old, is still pretty accurate and agree with all of its points. There are still not enough blacks in the game of baseball today. There are also not enough black managers in Major League Baseball which could have an impact on the game too. I think that RBI programs across America are gradually starting to help. Recently, Mark Teixeira of the New York Yankees donated over 1 million dollars to open an RBI program in Harlem, New York. This goes to show that white players are even noticing the problem and are trying to do something about it. The League has very few black ambassadors today and can definitely use more to influence young blacks. The most popular players today are either American born or

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