Now that the Major League Baseball playoffs are over and the Chicago Cubs have been crowned World Series champions for the first time in over a century, another baseball story from a few weeks ago deserves revisiting.
In early September, Orioles center fielder Adam Jones was asked if baseball players would join Colin Kaepernick and a growing list of other athletes in protesting inequality during the national anthem. He said it wasn’t likely. Why? In his words, “Baseball is a white man’s sport.”
This statement is misleading. It reduces the nuances of American diversity to white and black. It also dismisses MLB’s comparatively high representation of Latino athletes.
Perhaps what Jones meant to say is that baseball is not an almost exclusively African American sport like basketball or football. That is true. While the NFL and NBA are 68 percent and 74 percent black respectively, African Americans make up a paltry 8 percent of MLB. Black people make up about 13 percent of the general population.
Latinos, on the other hand, represent nearly a third of MLB players, compared to just 1.8 percent of NBA players and 1.1 percent of NFL players. White people are actually underrepresented in MLB relative to their share of the country’s population.
Jones and others should be more careful not to value one form of diversity over another. No minority group deserves to be marginalized or neglected. It is regrettable that Jones feels unable to contribute to a social justice movement because of the racial breakdown of Major League Baseball, but classifying baseball as “a white man’s sport” is simply untrue.