While I’ll buy the part about high schools dropping baseball as a sport (due to Title IX issues as well as money issues), hasn’t it always been true that fewer black men go to college (for whatever reason)?
Black players are not being left out of baseball. Are they the majority? No. So what?
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070607/COL22/706070424/1048/SPORTS
In this article they make the point that at a beginning level the Latino players are treated much more harshly than their American couterparts. Due to their escape from very poor backgrounds they will accept much more without making trouble. At what llevel that stops I do not know.
But they are not aggressively pursued either, as opposed to their Latino counterparts.
Not saying I agree with it one way or the other, but that seems to be the case.
The point is made, but without any documentation, other than at one time the Tigers supposedly brought players over without visas and so they weren’t allowed to leave the training camp. There’s zero evidence presented that minor league conditions are worse for Latin players than for any other players.
More telling is this comment, which is similar to something I noted a few posts ago:
“In some Latin countries, baseball is so ingrained in the culture that kids will play with homemade bats, balls and no shoes. That’s not the case in America anymore.”
It seems natural that baseball clubs would most eagerly pursue players who have a strong feeling for the game and have been practicing their skills since an early age without the need for fancy equipment and organized leagues.
Mexicans are not being aggressively pursued by the National Hockey League as opposed to their Canadian counterparts.
Is this because the NHL doesn’t like Mexicans, or finds them harder to control? Or is it because the grassroots love of hockey and vast developmental programs in Canada mean bigger returns for an investment in scouting?
I don’t see how that has anything to do with Sheffield’s point.
Many Latin players arrive here (some actually have to defect) to play baseball and they are not immediately citizens of the US. Their mere existence in the US is precarious at best and is based on their membership in professional baseball. If they don’t play hard 100% of the time or if they don’t take shit, they’re going back home to be poor and hungry again.
Look at all the Mexican/Central American people emigrating here who’ll do shit work for low wages. Why do they do it? For the same reason that a Latin player will take shit from managers. Being poor here in the US is a hell of a lot better than being poor where they’re from.
I liken the people in the business of Major League Baseball to the contractors that drive around in their pickup trucks offering work to day laborers.
…
On the flip side, could one construe Sheffield’s point as being that blacks are generally just huge pains in the ass to deal with?
Well, are there a lot of frozen ponds and skating rinks in Mexico?
(that question was as rhetorical as yours)
Do you not think Sheffield has a point? Or are you still going on with the weak-ass racism argument, even in the face of the fellow Latino baseball player agreeing with him?
No.
Yup. It’s bullshit.
You forgot to prepend this with “I think.”
It’s because Mexicans don’t play hockey. Duh. Hockey requires a specialized playing surface and equipment which the average Mexican or Dominican or Honduran kid does not have access to.
Baseball – like soccer – is a game that kids can play with very little equipment (much of which can be improvised) and which can be accomodated to whatever playing surface is available. So the talent pool for baseball is huge in those countries while the pool for hockey is non-existent. The comparison is ridiculous.
Point being that to go home for a Latino player was much worse. The miserable conditions were acceptable to them because home was worse. The implication was that they could not treat blacks that way.
Salon makes some very good arguments about how Sheffield made some legitimate points, but was completely inarticulate in getting the point across without stepping into a hornet’s nest. Excerpts:
Do you think Gary trips over his own unintentional irony on his way to the mirror?
Regarding Torii Hunter’s comment about Latin American players being signed for $2000 - here’s a listing of top international signees by MLB in 2006.
Eleven out of twelve of the top signings appear to involve Latino players (from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela), who got signing bonuses ranging from $525,000 to $2.1 million (four such players got between $1.3 and 2.1 million).
Whether there actually are Latino players receiving only $2000 or whether they are figments of Hunter’s imagination, I don’t know. :dubious:
There’s no question that MLB treats young American and non-American prospects differently. They have a draft for Americans (and Canadians and Puerto Ricans) and don’t for others. This differential treatment almost certainly plays a role in the growing percentage of Latins in MLB.
It isn’t obvious which system is better, worse, or “more exploitative”. The draft, after all, wasn’t instituted to “protect” American players, it was instituted to prevent bidding wars by allowing each prospect to sign with one and only one team. So does the lack of a draft “exploit” Latin Americans, or does it do them a favor?
Most likely, some of both. Under a draft, teams have to wait until a player gradutes high school (age 18) or, if he chooses to attend college, until after his junior year (age 21). They have no incentive to develop players before that time, because they can’t sign them and reap the benefits. Ergo, player development is left to schools, parents, and whatever youth leagues might be available in a player’s neighborhood.
Football and basketball work the same way, and have seen no dimunition in African-American participation. But baseball requires more sophisticated equipment and training to develop skills, and many inner city schools have either dropped it or run inferfior programs. Ergo, the institution of a draft and the ban on signing high-school-age players has weakend African-American participation.
In Latin America, there is no draft, and teams can sign players as long as they’ll turn 17 by the end of the current season. So the modus operandi is to sign as many players as you can, as young and as cheaply as you can, and then develop them at your own facilities–because they aren’t yet ready to come to the U.S. and play minor league baseball, and because once you’ve signed a player, you don’t leave his development in the hands of outsiders.
Given this m.o., even the poorest Latin player has the opportunity to benefit from MLB-supplied equipment and training from age 16 forward. And naturally, some of them make the major leagues and swell the percentage of Latins. But also, many of them don’t, and the “academies” inevitably take on the aura of cattle feedlots taking a lot of young players in and spitting most of them out.
So, what do we do about this? Do we abolish the draft for Americans? Do we really want MLB teams signing black American kids and taking them out of school at age 16, even though this would result in more playing MLB? No, I don’t think that we do.
Do we make the draft worldwide, so Latins work under the same rules? This is probably coming, and it will mean that Latin player development to age 18 is left to Latin schools and youth leagues, which will probably skew the market toward more affluent players as it does in this country. And, over time, it will probably mean a dimunition in the number of Latin major leaguers.
Or we can make inane comments about Latins being “easier to control”, and do nothing.
And black U.S. citizens don’t play baseball… well, as much as Latin Americans. Duh. Baseball is proportionately far more popular and important across Latin America than it is to American blacks. The only competing sport is soccer; in the U.S. black kids play basketball and football, as well as other sports. Baseball can be played year-round in most of Latin America, whereas many U.S. blacks live in places where playing baseball in January isn’t possible. Freddy also points out that the rules of the MLB draft enable even more Latin kids to get involved with MLB an an earlier age, as opposed to North American kids of all ages, whose entry into the MLB development system is more regulated.
The availability and use of baseball talent from different populations is directly proportional to the popularity of the sport and availability of development opportunities in those populations, and nothing else. You can even see this if you subdivided the populations in question; there are more Latin players from, say, the Dominican Republic than from Mexico, simply because baseball’s far more popular in the Dominican.
Why are so many NBA players black, and so few white? Because blacks play basketball more than whites.
Why are so many elite soccer players Brazilian, and so few elite soccer players American? Because Brazilians play soccer more than Americans do.
Why is it that so many Olympic swimming champions are Australian, but very few are Pakistani? I’ll give you three guesses, and “Racial differences” is wrong.
The comparison’s perfectly valid, if you’re not stupid.
From a commentary on Sheffield’s remarks at si.com:
Sheffield managed to stereotype Latins as overly docile and African-Americans as troublesome in back-to-back sentences, a rare quinella of stupidity.
But he compounded his foolishness in follow-up interviews when he tried to explain how Major League Baseball was catering to Latins but not blacks.
“The subject was players of my race and what we deal with and why they don’t look in the inner cities for that same talent that they do in other places,” he said. "[Latin players] have a backing, a support when they come off the island, and black players don’t …
And Sheffield continued, “When you see Major League Baseball putting academies in other countries, obviously that throws up a red flag. You wonder why they ain’t going up in our neighborhood. Bottom line, what I see, I talk about. … I see it over and over. if anybody can show me I’m wrong, then show me.”
That’s where MLB had to step in. According to Jimmie Lee Solomon, baseball’s executive vice president of baseball operations, MLB just put up a $10 million baseball facility in Compton, Calif. called the Urban Youth Academy, complete with four fields and a 12,500-square foot clubhouse on a 10-acre plot.
Not only that, but Solomon said that the Atlanta Braves put up an academy in Atlanta with the financial backing of Chipper Jones, Mike Hampton, Brian Jordan and John Smoltz. In addition, a site is being selected in Washington, D.C., the Phillies are building an academy in Philly, the Red Sox in Boston and the Astros in Houston.
Plus, MLB has run the RBI program since 1991, with 165,000 of 200,000 of its young ballplayers playing in the U.S. And there’s more. The Baseball Tomorrow Fund, a joint venture from MLB and the Players Association, has targeted $10 million in grants to aid baseball in inner cities and impoverished areas.
It’s no surprise that Sheffield spoke without facts, which has been a bad habit of his over the years."