December 31, 2002
On Race And Baseball
Over at Blissful Knowledge, Dr. Manhattan has published some thoughts on baseball's legacy on race, and how it's still affecting the way one franchise, the Boston Red Sox, still does business today (which is something both Jim Rice and Mo Vaughn could tell us something about):
Why have the Boston Red Sox not won a World Series in 84 years...and counting?
In an effort to keep warm through this longer-than-usual (for a Yankee fan) baseball winter, I recently paged through a book that offers a partial answer to that question. In Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, Howard Bryant (a sportswriter for the Bergen Record who grew up in Boston) details how, for many years after Jackie Robinson entered major league baseball, the Red Sox did not attempt to sign black players and passed up chances to sign players such as Willie Mays. Even after the Red Sox integrated, Bryant describes how, into shockingly recent times, the team has often made life difficult for its black players. Others such as Glenn Stout have also described how the Red Sox’s slowness to integrate contributed to its mediocrity in the 1950s and 1960s, but Bryant’s book goes further in explicating the residual effects of the team’s problems with race.
The Red Sox’s problems recruiting and keeping black players have been, first and foremost, a moral failing. But they were also, as the team’s fans probably realize, a bad business practice. A sports team’s business is to win, and - as Bryant notes - a team in a competitive environment such as major league baseball cannot ignore a talent stream as substantial as African-American players and expect to win championships.
The good doctor goes further, wondering whether or not the Yankees' collapse in the mid-60s wasn't directly tied to their failure to sign more African-American players. In an update, Dave Pinto chimes in with some important perspective as well, showing that seeing the end of the Yankees dynasty in the mid-60s exclusively through the prism of race might not explain everything -- something the Dr. elaborates on.
For years, the only African-American player of any note on the Yankees roster outside of Elston Howard was Roy White (the one Yankee whose career spanned the last of the glory years of the 60s, as well as the mid-70s revival) -- something that really didn't change until Chris Chambliss, Willie Randolph, Mickey Rivers and of course, Reggie Jackson, found their way into the lineup. In fact, you could make the argument that Jackson was the first true African-American superstar to ever wear pinstripes.
Just one last thought: Dr. Manhattan notes that while Branch Rickey and his counterparts in the National League did the right thing morally by integrating faster than their counterparts in the American League, we shouldn't ignore that such an act was simply in their self-interest. But after reading David Pinto's comments, I think we might have to take that conclusion a step further.
Simply put, the Yankees lead in acquiring talent over the rest of the Major Leagues was so great, that their opponents in the National League had little choice but to stock their rosters with talented African-Americans. In the end, they really had no other option if they wanted to close the yawning talent gap with the most successful franchise in baseball history.
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A bunch of interesting baseball articles out there right now. We'll start with Dr. Manhattan's look at how the breaking [Read More]
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