No baseball player has hit for the "
triple crown" (leading the league in batting average, RBIs, and home runs) in decades, and it's quite likely that no one ever will again. In fact it's not entirely desirable that one does, since as baseball analysis has evolved the understanding of slugging percentage as far more important than batting average has grown with it. Most teams (and sluggers) prefer to boost their power numbers over their batting average, and hitting the ball far requires a harder swing with a bigger risk of failure (and reward). Hence we get regular double crown winners since RBIs and HRs have a lot of natural overlap, while the batting average title usually goes to speedy guys with great bat control who can punch a lot of singles without striking much, ALA Tony Gwynn or Ichiro.
On a related topic, while there's no actual racism triple crown award in baseball, and if there were it would probably have to be a quadruple crown with the growing numbers of Japanese players in MLB, I'd like to single out Gary Sheffield's recent effort. In an
interview with GQ magazine, he offered his thoughts on the declining percentage of black players in MLB, and managed to insult Whites, Blacks, and Latinos all at once.
"I called it years ago. What I called is that you're going to see more black faces, but there ain't no English going to be coming out. … [It's about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do -- being able to control them," he told the magazine.
"Where I'm from, you can't control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man.
"These are the things my race demands. So, if you're equally good as this Latin player, guess who's going to get sent home? I know a lot of players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys."
Nifty, eh? In just a couple of quotes he called Latinos house boys who do what they're told, said that Blacks can't follow rules or behave themselves in a professional work environment, and implied that Whites are the evil, controlling puppet masters who manipulate the darker races for their own benefit.
Sheffield's being roundly-castigated for these remarks, but does he deserve it? And in an not necessarily related question, is he correct? Given that the owners of professional sports teams in the US is probably around 98% white, it's kind of hard to argue his third point. His second one is hard to argue too, and since it's kind of a backhanded compliment to his fellow blacks (or at least a soothe to the non-conformist soul) it's not going to get him into too much trouble. What he says about Latinos can't really be construed as anything but an insult, so long as you value "being yourself" over following a few rules in order to earn millions of dollars for hitting a white ball around a grass field. I think the most easy and obvious attack on Gary's logic here is a favorite line of mine. "That's why they call it 'work.'" As every living human with a job can likely attest, you often have to do things you don't want to, and you're often treated poorly. That kind of goes with people giving you money to do a task for them. I'm sure in his real life Gary's entirely understanding if the car wash attendant, or waiter, or bellhop whose services he engages doesn't want to do things as he's told and wants to "go back to being who he is" and refuses to follow the rules or requirements of his job.
To put Gary's remarks in context, here's some recent demographic info on major league baseball players, from the same article:
According to a 2005 report by the University of Central Florida Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only 8.5 percent of major leaguers were African-American -- the lowest percentage since the report was initiated in the mid-1980s. By contrast, whites comprised 59.5 percent of the majors' player pool, Latinos 28.7 percent and Asians 2.5.
I was surprised to see this, especially given that the NFL is at least 50% black, and the NBA is more like 80%. So is baseball really that different, in terms of the skill set required? Do baseball players have to put up with that much more bullshit and control from management, and is that sport somehow uniquely driving off the blacks who seem to have no problem adjusting to life as a professional basketball or football player?
It's long been news that baseball isn't as popular among American youth as other sports, and that it's especially under-represented in poor areas. I can see the logic there for basketball, since you don't need much/any equipment to play basketball. There are hoops up on courts everywhere, and any number of players, down to one, can spend hours playing and improving their skills with no more equipment than a bouncing ball and some sneakers. But football requires far more equipment and players and a bigger playing area than baseball, and it and baseball seem to both be supported by just about every high school in America. So why are black kids so prevalent in football and basketball, but not in baseball?
I think the sport itself offers some answers. Basketball and football are more about all around athletic ability. In a nutshell, you don't need to be an athlete to play baseball successfully. You don't need to be fast, or strong, or quick, or agile, etc. Those things can help, and some of them are mandatory for different defensive positions, but if you are brilliant and hitting or pitching the ball, you've got very good odds of making it in the major leagues, regardless of your other physical abilities. As John Kruk once said, "I'm not an athlete; I'm a baseball player." Kruk was fat, slow, and not very strong, but he had the ability to hit the ball, and for that he earned millions of dollars a year for more than a decade, before moving into a cushy position on ESPN's baseball tonight, from which he can dispense entirely irrelevant conventional wisdom into the ears of the perpetually-shrinking number of adult American men who still give a shit about "the national pastime."
Hitting a baseball is a very difficult thing, but you don't have to outrun anyone to hit it, or leap over anything, or dodge tacklers to get to home plate. You just stand there in the little box and wait for the pitcher to throw it, knowing he has to throw it at a certain height right over the plate. Pitching requires even less athletic ability, in that you merely need to throw the ball in some tricky way so that most of the hitters can't hit it. Pitchers don't need to run or catch, most of them aren't very good at fielding their position, and in half of the league they don't even need to hit. They have one job skill, and it's one that virtually any clumsy oaf, the kind of physical specimen who couldn't last 30 seconds on a football field or basketball court (unless the oaf had tremendous physical size, which pretty much rules out Latinos) can fulfill admirably.
My point here is not to rebuff or agree with anything Sheffield said, but to point out that the pool of potential baseball players is enormously larger than football or basketball, simply because those sports are self-limiting by requiring that their players be... athletes. (There are exceptions, of course. Quarterbacks and kickers are often akin to baseball pitchers in possessing one key skill, and behemoth size can make up for a lot of missing athletic talent.) Lots of baseball players are great athletes, but quite a few are not, and the sport is more about a painstakingly-acquired skill set that's largely dependent upon early immersion into the game and constant practice at the key ability -- hitting a pitch with a bat.
Temperament, the issue Sheffield was nibbling at, might well come into play in that, but it would require even more pop psychology than I'm willing to delve into. Does becoming a successful baseball player require a higher tolerance for correction and constant coaching than other sports? Do you have to listen to a hitting coach and learn from what he tells you and do things as they want you to do them, to a greater amount than aspiring basketball or football players? Is there a racial aspect to an individual's willingness to put in the time and concentration and effort required? Answering that seems to require far more generalization than insight into an individual's psyche, but if anyone wants to give it a try, I'll be happy to listen.
Labels: baseball, basketball, bigotry, football, psychology, sports
