Astros' lack of blacks is big blemish
Silly me; I'd always thought the whole point of building a team was to get the best players possible. I was always taught that if you get the best players, you may have the best team, and if you have the best team, you can probably win a championship. Simple concept, eh? You would think....
Richard Hidalgo's departure has forced the Astros to confront an embarrassing reality about their racial makeup.
Only the caps are black.
Whether it happened by accident or by design, whether there's something sinister at work here or not, is open to interpretation. The facts themselves are damning.
The Astros are baseball's whitest team.
Something to be proud of, huh?
Let's summarize:
They'll have an all-white starting lineup most nights once Adam Everett returns.
They don't have a single African-American on their roster or coaching staff and very few in their minor-league system.
Now, don't get me wrong; I understand that the Astros are not representative of society as a whole. Even so, does a lack of racial diversity ipso facto make Astros management racist? Or does it simply represent the fact that they are trying to put together a winning team and there simply aren't many quality African-American baseball players? Don't ask me; I'm the one posing the questions here.
There are no doubt a number of reasons why talented African-American athletes are gravitating to other sports. Before we begin to indict the Houston Astros, or any other Major League team as racist, let's at least examine why things may be as they are.
Reasons for the decline apparently include such things as the lack of inner-city baseball programs and the cost of outfitting a kid to play baseball. And there's image. Kids are emulating Kobe Bryant and Terrell Owens, but not Jim Thome and Mike Piazza.
"I played three sports at Austin High School," said New York Mets coach Don Baylor, who is black. "You don't find kids doing that anymore. They're pretty much forced to pick their sport early on, and it's usually not baseball. Black kids see guys jumping from high school to the NBA. They see guys getting to the NFL three years after high school. You're not going to get to the big leagues that quickly."
Baseball says it's addressing the problem in a variety of ways.
This week, it began construction on a $3 million youth baseball academy in Compton, Calif. "We have said we'd do everything we can to build baseball for the kids and back in the inner cities, in areas that we have, quite frankly, neglected for the last two or three decades," commissioner Bud Selig said.
Hey, it's a step in the right direction. Besides, if Major League teams were truly racist, do you really think we'd see so many Dominicans and other Lations in the game? It's not a perfect world, certainly, but any general manager with half a brain is trying to find the best players he can. It's the only way a GM is going to be able to keep his job.
Does anyone really think you can win if you exclude players solely because of the color of their skin? No one will last long by limiting their options. Certainly, Major League Baseball can do better, but the largely white face of the game is not entirely their fault. It's not their fault that African-American kids seem to prefer slam dunks to double plays.
