yep, mookie betts of Boston may win the mvp and almost qualifies as RoY but played a couple games too many last year- already 30 HRs and 100 rbi i believe. And hes about the size of alex bregman--5'8 or so 175 lbs. adam jones and used to be david price. Juston Upton was supposed to be as was jason heyward. No more prince fielder, he retired. ended up with same amount of HRs as his dad.
no I get what you are saying, you just need to say it like this more often, some of your comments leave a lot to be desired honestly and I say to myself, he cant mean that. not Im not a lawyer. but those kids probably would have gone to school in some form or fashion, I had D2 scholarship offers coming out of high school, but I was pretty good academically, i chose the academic route and my tuition was paid for. My point is every story isnt despair and athletics saving the day. A lot of these kids have good enough grades to attend state schools for the most part. As far as blacks in baseball, its just not as fashionable and black people for the most part like to show out. I know a lot of black kids who play baseball. I have a 5 and a 3 year old they both love baseball, soccer, basketball and football and golf. I played baseball from 6 years old until I was about 15. Then I concentrated on basketball mainly and football. But to answer your question, its about popularity, baseball is great, but slow and these kids in the inner city who would be great at it, dont have the programs like the suburbs and the infrastructure to be great at it. Not like AAU or travel basketball is right now.
I understand that there is a lack of large open grassy spaces in the inner cities. Probably not many good coaches to teach the game either. I would have to research it to know but how many great black players came from large cities? Hank Aaron was from Mobile, AL which was probably a tiny village back in the 40's. Willie Mays is from rural Alabama and Bob Gipson from Omaha. I thought Jackie Robinson was from LA but he was from Cairo, GA. I am usually against so called "diversity programs" but in this case it would be a good thing for MLB to sponsor inner city baseball programs. Build a few fields, hire a few coaches, provide some bats and balls and gloves. Wouldn't cost a lot compared to the billions the sport rakes in. Look how much they do with so little in the Dominican Republic. Sticks for bats and taped up rocks for balls yet lots of Dominicans make it to MLB level. I stopped playing baseball at 15 too. Could hit the fastball pretty good but when I started facing pitchers who could actually put some movement on the ball my batting average took a nose dive.
MLB does have an extensive inner city youth program targeting blacks. Chicago had an entire black little league baseball team that went to the finals a couple years back, albeit they were stripped of their title for cheating, but the team ran through the competition like crap through a goose. MLB is pumping a ton of funds into inner city youth programs but in the end, it is the black kids that end up wanting other sports more and the ones that show up for the sponsored free leagues are 1 and done when they realize they can't compete at a winning level. They just move on to other sports where they can play a winning game. So the fallout is pretty extreme.
I don't think it's that easy to say strictly Latino if you are including the 4 main Latin American populations that play in MLB. Dominicans, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans all have West or Central African roots to some extent, particularly along coastal towns. So sometimes when you see a player who has a Latin name and comes from Cuba, for example, it doesn't mean he's Latino.....he very well could be Black.
I was including black Latinos in that but whether they are white Latino, Hispanic or black they are rooted in a different cultural milieu that American blacks and to them baseball is the #1 sport. Don't be so sure they all have African roots. Alex Rodriguez is Puerto Rican but he looks white. Sammy Sosa may be a black man but he grew up as a Dominican. He was a great athlete and if he had been American might have played football or basketball instead of baseball.
Baseball or soccer? Other than that, I agree. I didn't mean the players all have African heritage, just the populations of those countries all do to varying degrees. It stands to reason that some percent of the players from those countries are in fact, also black.
On that note, what direction are things going in these days? Cal State LA just became the 4th public university behind UConn, UC Davis, and UC Bezerkeley, to offer black-only co-ed housing as part of a demand from the Black Student Union. Black students claim they were "seeking refuge from what they consider insensitive remarks and “microaggressions” from their white classmates." Isn't integration and racial diversity supposed to be a part of public education? How does cocooning amongst one another help anything? And Georgetown University will now give preference in admissions to the descendants of slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits as part of its effort to atone for profiting from the sale of enslaved people. It was one of the largest documented slave sales in history and most ended up in Louisiana but I don't see how preferential admission today fixes anything. If they want to offer scholarships or some other program, fine but they are essentially punishing other potential students who had nothing to do with the events of the time.
Do you have to be a heterosexual white male to commit a microagression or can blacks, women and gays commit them too.
