Associated Press
Bob Gibson, a future Hall of Famer, with catcher Tim McCarver after his complete-game victory over Boston in Game 7 of the 1967 World Series.
When Boston and St. Louis first faced each other in the World Series, in 1946, there wasn't a single African-American in either dugout. As the Red Sox and the Cardinals meet again 67 years later, there is one.
But by charting the franchises' four postseason battles — 1946, 1967, 2004 and now 2013 — one can also chart the ebb and flow of black Americans first into, and more recently away from, Major League Baseball. The question baseball faces is whether it is too late to stop that trend.
"The trend can be reversed," said David James, the director of Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, a youth program operated by M.L.B. "Baseball has done a good job of recognizing that there is a problem and has put in a number of things each year to try to reverse those trends."
James added: "It's going to take a lot of time for the impact of some of these programs, particularly at the youth level, to start to develop players that move up to major league potential."
The first Red Sox-Cardinals World Series came a year after the Red Sox were pressured into holding a tryout for Jackie Robinson, and a year before Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. By the time the teams met again in 1967, the African-American presence in baseball was 13.6 percent, the highest it had been. The Red Sox, the last major league team to integrate, fielded a starting lineup that included African-American stars like George Scott and Reggie Smith. They lost to a Cardinals team that was led by the Hall of Famers Bob Gibson and Lou Brock.
The number of black American players in baseball would continue to rise for two decades, reaching a peak in the 1980s, when nearly one in five major league players was a black American. But it had long been falling by the time the Cardinals and the Red Sox renewed their rivalry in the 2004 Series, when the most notable black players in the Series were Reggie Sanders and Tony Womack.
This fall, the only black American on either roster is Boston's Quintin Berry, a reserve outfielder whose only World Series appearance has been as a pinch-runner in Game 4.
Where have all the African-American players gone?
One answer is obvious: Black Americans have gravitated to basketball and football.
"Back in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and even into the '60s, to a considerable degree, basketball and football weren't the games," said Lawrence Hogan, a senior professor of history at Union County College in New Jersey and a scholar on black baseball.
"As society has changed and our culture has changed, they've become the games, to a point where a lot of people question whether baseball is the national pastime any longer," he said.
Hogan, 69, said he still considers baseball our national pastime, but he understands the preferences of a younger generation.
Another answer for the decline in black players is that their places have been filled by a growing Latin presence. Many players groomed in team-sponsored academies — especially in the Dominican Republic — make up 27.7 percent of M.L.B. rosters. This season, despite aggressive developmental programs like Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, the percentage of black American players is roughly 8.5, an unimpressive number.
Baseball seems to understand it, too: Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities began a junior division in 2009, introducing players as young as 5 to the game, before the pull of football and basketball becomes too strong.
A few years ago I asked Carl Crawford, then with the Tampa Bay Rays, how he had avoided the football-basketball dragnet. Actually, he said, he hadn't. Crawford, now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was a three-sport star at Jefferson Davis High School in Houston. He accepted a football scholarship to Nebraska. "The baseball draft was in June; I ended up getting drafted," he said. "I'm from a poor area. When baseball came with a contract, basically, that was it. It was the money that changed my mind. Baseball kind of chose me; I didn't really choose baseball."
Crawford, who grew in a predominantly black community in Houston, said the reason he sustained his interest in baseball was that his early experiences took place in predominantly black youth leagues. The equipment was furnished free, but the key was that the sport was a natural and daily part of his community.
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