Terry Foster: Baseball Loses Allure For African-Americans
The Eagle Sports Club runs a vibrant baseball program for approximately 600 boys and girls, 90 percent of whom are African-American.
Throughout the week, the youths fill the fields at Balduck Park, enjoying the sport and competing with friends.
Unfortunately, in Detroit and other inner cities, the excitement generated for baseball by the Eagle Sports Club is the exception, not the rule.
Interest in playing and watching baseball has seen an alarming decline in African-American communities. Experts blame the economy, the decline of the African-American family structure, the sparse marketing of current players and even video games.
The result is evident on every Major League Baseball team including the Tigers, where center fielder Austin Jackson and newly acquired Delmon Young are the only black players.
Only 8.5 percent of Major League players are African-American. That's down from 10 percent in 2010 and the lowest number since 2007, according to Richard Lapchick's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida.
In 1997, during the 50-year anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier, league rosters were 17 percent African-American.
"I don't know what is going on," said former Tigers outfielder Gates Brown, who played for the 1968 world champions. "You drive around the city and you see all those empty ball fields. When I was coming through, you saw kids on every lot. I don't understand it."
The numbers are so alarming to former Tigers slugger Willie Horton and his son Deryl that they met with MLB and Tigers officials at Comerica Park this summer. That was followed by a roundtable discussion at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where ideas were thrown around to revive baseball in Detroit.
