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Thursday, July 17, 2008
Negro Leagues
I’m watching Bob Costas NOW. I think it’s all uppercase, though I don’t know why. Is it an acronym? Here’s his site. Anyway, there were a couple of interesting things on that show:
I must say that Bob, as much as I don’t really care for his snooty attitude, asked very good questions. Really good. He asked Arte Moreno, point-blank, and off the bat, about Barry Bonds. Arte disappointed me. He hemmed and hawed, and then Bob tried to ask him again. And Moreno gave him such a b.s. answer about how they have a plan about promoting from within (Vlad!… Torii!… Matthews!). It was a horrible display by Moreno. And Bob.... dropped the ball. Bob had a plan to tackle certain issues, and he had a plan for allotted time, and he had a plan to also get to Andy Van Slyke and Dave Winfield on that panel, and nothing was going to stop him. Bob was far too gentle on Arte. Later on, he followed up about Matthews being implicated with PED, and Arte is now defending him, and not very well. Arte I thought came off terribly, just so very bad. The topic du jour was State of Baseball .... couldn’t he have been better prepared? At least he didn’t give us Bull Durham quotes. I’ll give Arte an F for his performance. Bob gets an A for the topics he brought up, and a D for followup questions.
Anyway, they talk about the lack of Blacks. Selig, Granderson, Van Slyke agree (*) that there’s a generational gap, that MLB lost an entire generation of Black fans. Granderson said that MLB went from 28% Black ballplayers to 8% in a span of 30 years. Van Slyke offered that Mays and Aaron (guests on the upcoming segment) were a product of the Negro Leagues, and therefore, there was a feeding system. (And I suppose kids who followed them were likely inspired.) After that though, it stopped. Seems to make sense. Negro Leagues could be like the European and Russian Leagues in hockey. If you shut them down, will the NHL still have as many Europeans and Russians in their league?
(*) I think they agreed. It was 6 in the morning, and I just woke up. And I’m writing this 4 hours later.
I’m thinking sprawl might have something to do with it as well. When I was a kid, I’d go to the park, and there’d be dozens of kids at a couple of the diamonds, and we’d play. No organization, no nothing. Show up with your glove, and you’re in a game. Now, it’s all about organization, and getting mom or dad to drive you. But, basketball in the urban areas, you show up, and you play. Baseball parks in the urban areas don’t really exist any more do they? Or not as much.
Why not organize a new Negro League? Right now, we have NCAA, which could be the Whites-Mostly League as far as Blacks are concerned. There’s no reason to tie in a league to your attending a college. It doesn’t make any sense really. In hockey, they have Major Junior leagues that are not linked to the player’s high school or college. You don’t have to be rich or smart to play in those leagues.
Wouldn’t a Negro League be awesome?
Bob gave another hard-hitting question to Arte about ticket prices, and about how the public subsidizes two-thirds of the price of the stadium, so shouldn’t the public get access to affordable tickets. Arte swung at strike 3. Bob’s point is that the game is not being passed down from generation to generation.