Critical Noir

"Baseball Been Berry, Berry Good to Me": Where Have all the African-American Players Gone?

Posted 06/07/2007 at 10:53 AM  |  2 comment/s

"Baseball been berry, berry good to me," and thus were the words of "Chico Escuela," a fictional Dominican Major League baseball player, who was one of the most popular characters performed by Garrett Morris during his run as the only black actor in the first cast of Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the late 1970s. At the time some understood “Chico Escuela” as a caricature of so-called “Latin” baseball players, who were presumed to be docile and accepting of their status as second-class citizens both within the league and the larger society. Morris, who is African-American, could apparently make light of the Latino presence in baseball at the time—some thirty-years after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers—because African-American ballplayers were some of the league’s great resources as players like Bobby Bonds (late father of Barry), Dave Parker, Jim Rice, Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, Dusty Baker, George Foster, Joe Morgan, Eddie Murray, J.R. Richards, Ken Griffey, Sr. and Dave Winfield were at or close to their professional peak.

Thirty years later, Major League Baseball’s most cherished assets are named Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Zambrano, David “Big Papi" Ortiz, Johan Santana, Miguel Cabrera and Jose Reyes. Indeed the fact that the general manager of the National League’s best team, The New York Mets, is named Omar Minaya is reflective of the unprecedented influence of Latino baseball players and administrators in professional baseball. The irony is that this same period also gives witness to the eroding presence of African-American (as opposed to black, which folk like Reyes and Ortiz, most certainly are) baseball players. Recently when GQ Magazine pressed Gary Sheffield, one of the most prominent African-American players, about the increased Latino presence, he suggested that it was because Latino players were thought to be easier to control. Chico Escuela lives.

Only those who weren’t watching the game closely could actually believe that somehow the Latino players of two generations ago, let alone their contemporary sports progeny, were being subservient. Just watch tapes of Roberto Clemente’s machismo inspired gait or Luis Tiant, Jr.’s dramatic windup or for the real fans, the way marginal first baseman Willie Montanez would flip the bat to the side, while running out of the batter’s box. The largely white commentators and analysts at the time had a name for players like Montanez: “hotdogs.” And yet these subtle flourishes were some of the ways that Latino players established their racial and ethnic identity in a sport that would rather whitewash them—flourishes that were not unlike the wild abandon that Jackie Robinson would steal home early in his career or the basket-catch that became Willie Mays’s trademark.

Years later quips like “that’s just Manny being Manny” in reference of the idiosyncrasies of Manny Ramirez, is a manifestation of Latino players trying to establish their individuality, especially at a time when many major league teams set up baseball academies in places like the Dominican Republic hoping that they can sign the next Jose Reyes—cheaply—at the age of 15. And in this regard Sheffield didn’t miss the mark—these academies are like finishing schools (or strip mines as Dave Zirin suggests) as franchises hope to have an increased ability to control, what they see as critical investments. Ironically it also points to one of the reasons, many African-Americans don’t pursue the sport seriously.

When Sheffield entered the major Leagues at a 19-year-old in 1988, he was on the latter cusp of the last major influx of African-American players. The 1980s produced African-American players such as Barry Bonds, Joe Carter, Fred McGriff, Ken Griffey, Jr. (all future hall of famers) Bo Jackson and the tragic examples of Darryl Strawberry and Sheffield’s uncle Dwight “Doc” Godden. When the latter two players broke into the Major Leagues with the New York Mets in 1983 and 1984 respectively, they were the first superstars produced by the team (this a team that once forced outfielder Cleon Jones to publicly apologize for having public sex with a white woman during spring training). Playing in the largest market in the country, Strawberry and Godden had the potential to be the flagship stars of the league for years to come. But rather than market the duo the way that the Chicago Bulls and the NBA marketed Michael Jordan, the Mets and the league seemed to take their African-American ballplayers for granted—as if the league was still living off the goodwill of allowing Robinson in the league. And remember this is also an era when Al Campanis, general managerthe Los Angeles Dodgers, stated on national television on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color-line, that he didn’t think African-Americans had the cerebral capabilities to be good managers (can somebody say Cito Gaston—two times!)

While the careers of Strawberry and Godden were ultimately derailed by their inability to use good judgment, particularly in relation to the cocaine that seemingly flowed freely in major league clubhouses in the 1980s, the reality is that the Mets never fully understood the pressures that were placed on two African-American men who were 21 and 19 respectively when they entered the league. In many ways the outspokenness of Sheffield and Barry Bonds’s arrogance and aloofness are a manifestation of that particularly moment in baseball. Indeed the Mets recently chided one of their only African-American players, Lastings Milledge, for recording a “gangsta rap” CD as if African-American players are not allowed to continue to live in the worlds that produced them in the first place—this twenty years after Strawberry was called out by white teammate Wally Backman for making a rap record (Strawberry in kind, called him a “redneck”). The reality is that with the Major Leagues unable and unwilling to market a new generation of African-American players, like Sheffield and Bonds, who they deemed as too difficult, young African-Americans turned to sports like professional basketball and football, where the stylish imprint of African-Americans—and increasingly hip-hop, to the dismay of both the NFL and NBA—could be easily discerned.

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