Dodgers manager Dave Roberts says MLB needs to do more about the reduced percentage of African American players in the majors. “I think about it all the time. It’s really getting uncomfortable,” he says. (John Hefti / Associated Press)
The word Dave Roberts kept coming back to was “uncomfortable.”
Jackie Robinson Day is the day Major League Baseball celebrates all it has done to bring Black people back to baseball. On this 75th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, Roberts is using the day to call out MLB for cutting back on opportunities for Black players.
“It’s really hit me in the face,” Roberts said, “that I have to be uncomfortable.”
To call Robinson a Hall of Fame baseball player is a painfully incomplete description, almost a mythology. He was an activist for civil rights and for social justice.
“Jackie Robinson made my success possible,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1968.
On the 25th anniversary of his breaking the color barrier, Robinson accepted an invitation from MLB to be honored at the World Series. He ended his speech by calling out the league and giving voice to his hope that he might one day “see a Black face managing in baseball.”
Fifty years later, there are two Black faces managing in the majors, Roberts for the Dodgers and Dusty Baker for the Houston Astros. The percentage of African American players in MLB has fallen from 19% in 1986, according to the Society of American Baseball Research, to 7% on this…