Baseball in the Big City

The sport of baseball has become one of the longest standing traditions in this country. Its claim as the national pastime has derived from the sport’s longevity and the romanticized association it has developed with American heritage. Football has undoubtedly taken the reigns as the most watched and the most lucrative of the major sports in this country, but nonetheless baseball has remained consistent and is not lacking in attendance in its own right. One area of concern baseball has had in its ongoing competition for popularity has been the lack of appeal it has for people in the African American population. Baseball has become a global game in many ways. Thanks to places like Japan as well as the better part of Central America, baseball has become a major sport of choice in all corners of the globe. However the game is still having trouble within segments of the country’s very own borders. The black community has been increasingly underrepresented in the sport’s professional ranks. African Americans has decreased annually over the past decade and as of 2011 made up only 8.5% of the total major league population. Out of the total 38.3% of people of color in the league, the majority comes from the Latino population. It does not seem appropriate for the sport most associated with the black civil rights movement to have such an apparent low appeal for the black community; but even so that is the case. One of the biggest reasons for the statistics being this way can be seen in the geographical placement of all these ballplayers. Central America for example, provides ample amount of physical resources which support the availability of the game. A warm climate and the large amount of undeveloped space naturally persuades people in these areas to participate in a game like baseball more than it would for a child living in the city; where the world of pavement they live in makes a sport such as basketball more appealing. The same point can be made with suburban life in the United States. This primarily white population has more access and monetary resources to focus on baseball than either of the aforementioned cultures. The inner city population is at a disadvantage both economically and geographically. This alone is enough for the predominantly black community that makes up urban America to not get the exposure necessary to gain interest. In the grand landscape of sports, the “contested racial terrain” (Hartmann 2000) that it produces tilts the allure of opportunity for blacks towards the high profile worlds of basketball and football. To attempt to counter the declining trend in such a valuable fan market, major league baseball has created the RBI (Reviving baseball in inner cities) program. Focusing on the youth of the inner city is the type of public relations move which benefits not only the league’s image, but most importantly it gives hope to reverse the trend for the future. Although this is a commendable effort, they face an uphill battle against the established black generation’s lack of interest as well as the expanding dominance of the other two major sports on the black community.
  RBI program details http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/community/rbi_facts.jsp
Other resources- http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=6401971
Hartmann, Douglass. "Rethinking the Relationships Between Sport and Race in American Culture: Golden Ghettos and Contested Terrain." Sociology of Sport Journal 17.3 (2000): 229-253