Does anyone have a general breakdown on the percentage of African American pitchers in MLB since 1946? I guess I should really say “black” pitchers, in the sense of players who would have been excluded due to baseball’s Jim Crow laws.
I’m thinking this is not a “great debate,” just a search for a little factual help in a debate. E.G. A friend claims that Ruth’s records are “meaningless” because he didn’t face balck pitchers. I tell him that Bonds faces very few black pitchers himself; it’s pitching records which I maintain should be more suspect, not hitting ones.
I can’t help (yet), but you might suggest to your friend that, had Bonds followed a Ruthian diet of hot dogs rather than steroids, there might not be a debate going on here. Not to take away from Bonds athletic abilities, which are truly great.
The question is: Would the inclusion of blacks have raised the overall skill level of major league pitching? I don’t see how there can be a factual answer to this question.
My guess, though, is; no. There were some very good pitchers in the bigs when Ruth was at his prime. And the league pitchers struck him out a record number of times.
The race of the pitchers is less of a factor than the fact that in Ruth’s time, pitchers were expected to go the distance. With relief pitching, a player nowadays is facing a fresh pitcher late in the game, as oppoised to a tiring one.
OTOH, in Ruth’s day there were 16 major league teams; now there are thirty. That means he faced the equivalent of roughly the top 50% of pitchers today. Expansion has given jobs to pitchers who relative talent would never have gotten them anywhere near the majors in Ruth’s day.
In addition, blacks are somewhat underrepresented on pitching staffs; most pitching staffs are primarily white.
You’d probably get some pretty significant swings depending on what you counted as black, but so far I’ve been able to find a few references to the overall percentage of blacks. Not pitchers specifically, in other words. A NY Daily News article from last year had this:
Article. Other sources said the number was 25 or 27 percent in 1975, but I guess that’s the ballpark we’re talking about.
Anecdotally, I also think it’s safe to say that a greater percentage of non-pitchers than pitchers are black. I don’t have any evidence, but it seems like a fair assumption- just think of a team and compare in your head. Wait- unbelievably, I just found a cite, dated today that makes this claim:
I don’t know about that claim, since I thought CC Sabathia was Hispanic, and there are a whole bunch of dark-skinned Hispanic starters. I could be mistaken, though, and if they’re anywhere close to the truth, that’s not very many starting pitchers, so it would support your argument. I would caution that since you were referring to pitchers who would be banned by the Jim Crow laws, those numbers might not mean a whole lot. There’s a few more dark-skinned non-American pitchers out there- Pedro, Jose Contreras, the Hernandez boys, Odalis Perez, Escobar, guys like that.
Also, sort of off-topic, but regarding the Ruth/ Bonds thing, just look at the numbers. It can’t be all that meaningless when you look at what other players were doing before and during Ruth’s time.
The OP might want to ask his friend: if the pitching staffs of the 1920’s were so weak, due to the absence of black pitchers, why didn’t EVERYBODY hit 50 or 60 homers a year, as Ruth did? Why was the Bambino the only one able to take advantage of those weak white pitchers?
Moreover, he should dare his friend to NAME some great white players whose stats suffered due to the integration of baseball. If his friend’s theory held water, Ted Williams’ batting average should have plummeted in the ten years after the American League was integrated. It didn’t. If his theory made sense, Stan Musial’s batting average should have plummeted in the ten years after the National League was integrated. It didn’t. In fact, there’s NO indication that the presence of top black players in major league baseball hurt the stats of the white guys who’d been stars before 1947.