On blacks in MLB: blame game is off base

[Auggie]

Bruce Jenkins, San Francisco Chronicle / Thursday, May 6, 2010

There's a lot of consternation these days about the decline of African American talent in baseball, and it's a topic worthy of concern. There's a prevailing opinion that the institution of Major League Baseball has somehow screwed this up, which completely misses the point. It is also widely assumed that young African Americans don't have enough role models in today's game - players to emulate, to phrase it better - and that's just plain wrong.

It should be hastily noted that if you're looking for expertise on this matter, you might not be turning to a white sportswriter from Half Moon Bay (CA). But I'm old enough to have been influenced by the game's greatest era, a time when black athletes were the very essence of baseball, and that's the source of some worthwhile perspective.

As a kid growing up in Southern California, I felt sorry for the fans who adopted the expansion Los Angeles Angels in the early '60s. Their league was so hopelessly behind. The National League's brand of ball was infinitely more entertaining, sophisticated and progressive with the likes of Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Richie Allen, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Willie Davis and Maury Wills (there were dozens more) dictating play.

These were children of the Great Depression, born in the 1930s and getting a sense of their athletic prowess in the years after World War II. If you were lucky enough to own a television set in the early '50s, there wasn't much to watch in the realm of sports. The NFL was many years away from its booming popularity, and the NBA was a fly-by-night outfit operating out of places like Rochester, Fort Wayne and Sheboygan.

CONTINUED: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/05/SP851D8TKM.DTL

Interesting read — Auggie