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Monday, May 23, 2011
Denying the Black ballplayer
I’m not much an NBA fan. I know the stars, and that’s pretty much it. If we make a list of the best ballplayers in my generation (Bird/Magic), and going with nothing more than guessing, I’ll say, in random order: Bird, Magic, Isaiah, Stockton, Karl Malone, Jordan, Pippen, Drexler, Barkley, Iverson, Lebron, Shaq, Kobe, Duncan, Robinson, Garnett, Hakeem, Novitzki, Nash, Kidd. Again, no idea how good that list is. I’m just throwing out names I’ve heard. Let’s see, that’s… 20 names. Good, makes dividing easy. Of those, Bird, Stockton, Novitzki, and Nash are white. That’s 20%. I seem to remember that 25% of all NBA players are non-Black. So, I think it’s safe to say that based on my priors, that we should expect about 75% of the greatest basketball players to be Black.
But, before whatever the color line is in the NBA, we’re going to get a ton of non-Blacks in the discussion as greatest ever. This is of course terrible unfortunate and heavily biased against the great Black players who couldn’t make it in the NBA. And so we have Kareem highlighting the greatest basketball team that we don’t know (amidst his tame statue controversy).
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Since baseball doesn’t have that level of white/black imbalance, the problem isn’t as bad, but it still exists. Which is why I pretty much draw the line at players born since 1931 (Mays/Mantle). That 1931 birth line is pretty useful for me, because you have to go back to players born in 1926, or maybe 1918, to find superstars. And starting with players born since 1931, you were getting tons of great ballplayers born (at double the pace of pre-1931 born players). Whether that’s because of opportunities given to non-Whites, or opportunities based on expansion, or opportunities based on MLB becoming a more viable vocation, who knows. But, it does save me from having a disproportionate number of white players being the greatest ever by drawing that line.
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