Diversity Key For The Future of Baseball

            When Rob Manfred took over as the commissioner of baseball at the beginning of this year, he made it clear that changes were on the horizon. It was a much-needed difference from his predecessor, Bud Selig, who was at the helm of the MLB for 17 years, and did virtually nothing to improve the game as it was played on the field.

            Manfred has made his priorities clear as commissioner, and thankfully one of them is pace of play. In an open letter to Manfred prior to the season, I laid out my plan to make baseball more appealing to the younger generation, and while he didn’t take me on many of my suggestions, he has made changes to speed up the game, and I think it’s worked. Now that batters are forced to keep at least one foot in the box at all times, and there is a clock in-between innings, games seem to be moving quicker. Though the average game time is down just eight minutes from last year in the first month of the season, it feels like the game is moving quicker.

            While I myself have pointed out long baseball games as a problem, it is now clear to me that the actual time of game doesn’t matter as much as the speed at which the game moves along. Most football games take upward of four hours, but you don’t hear very many people complaining and saying that football is boring, and that’s because the game moves quicker, and there is less wait-time between plays. If baseball can do the same, it will become more appealing to people of my generation. 

            While pace of play is the issue that I’ve put most of my attention towards, it has been made clear by comedian Chris Rock that baseball has another problem, and that is getting black people interested in the game. Rock was featured on HBO’s Real Sports with Byant Gumbel, and he pointed out the decline of blacks who are interested in America’s national pastime. “I’m an endangered species,” the popular comedian said. “A black baseball fan. Why don’t black people like baseball anymore?”

            Rock went on to point out that neither team competing in the World Series last year had a black player on their roster, and that crowds in St. Louis for the World Series were more than 90% white. Almost every ratio you can find supports Rock’s point. Blacks don’t like baseball. They make up just 8% of MLB rosters and that number is falling fast.

            For me, this boils down to one thing. The culture of Major League Baseball is southern and white. Country music, chewing tobacco, hunting, and fishing are all things that many, if not most, baseball players enjoy, but aren’t things that are found in many black households.

            A sport’s culture defines who plays it and who enjoys it. Basketball, which is incredibly popular with young people right now, is a sport that has a very black culture, and even promotes itself that way. Basketball replaces country music with rap, which resonates better with young people who don’t live in Southern America.

            Rock says that in order to succeed, baseball needs to be more black, because “black America decides what’s hot, and what people get excited about.”

            Undoubtedly baseball needs to attract more young people, and if getting black people interested will get young people more interested, then Chris Rock hit the nail on the head.

Contact Jasper Goodman at jgoodman@radiovermont.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jasper_Goodman.