Do Black Kids Still Like Baseball?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
It was one of the most memorable times I spent with my dad. Summer of 1973 and Hank Aaron was running down Babe Ruth’s career homerun record. The Atlanta Braves were in New York City for a weekend series with the New York Mets and my day surprised me with tickets. Hammerin’ Hank didn’t disappoint—he hit two homers that day. By the season’s end, Aaron had 713 homerun, two short of breaking Ruth’s record.
My dad couldn’t afford to take me to games often. Though we lived in the Bronx, literally minutes from Yankee Stadium, my dad was a Mets fan—a holdover National League fan from the 1950s before the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco and took my dad’s favorite player, Willie Mays. For my dad’s generation of Black men, Black baseball players, led by Jackie Robinson, Mays, Aaron and Frank Robinson, who would later become Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, were the realization of a world undergoing change.
When I first started watching baseball during the 1971 World Series, the sport was dominated by young Black ballplayers. The 1971 Pirates, who won the series that year, were the Blackest team in the league, in both style and substance, featuring future hall- of-famers Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente (whose running style everybody wanted to imitate), Dock Ellis, who the year before pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD, Al Oliver and Rennie Stennent. Not interested in political issues, the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were my dad’s version of Black Power and he made sure I understood the significance of their ascendance as champions.
I was hooked, as many of my peers were, this in the era before the NBA had become an international brand and the New York Knicks were derisively described as the New York “N----r-bockers.” Part of the appeal was that many of the best baseball players in the 1970s and early 1980s were Black, and they were fundamentally changing the way the game was being played, whether talking about Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson on the base paths, Rod Carew, whose .388 batting average in 1977 was the highest in thirty years and Reggie Jackson, who became Mr. October.
Black dominance in professional baseball made sense in the 1970s, as the era marked the high-water mark of the percentage of Black players in the Major Leagues. For many kids in the hood, baseball was still a sport that could get you out of the hood, into college, the minor leagues and possible the majors. But something has happened along the way.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
It was one of the most memorable times I spent with my dad. Summer of 1973 and Hank Aaron was running down Babe Ruth’s career homerun record. The Atlanta Braves were in New York City for a weekend series with the New York Mets and my day surprised me with tickets. Hammerin’ Hank didn’t disappoint—he hit two homers that day. By the season’s end, Aaron had 713 homerun, two short of breaking Ruth’s record.
My dad couldn’t afford to take me to games often. Though we lived in the Bronx, literally minutes from Yankee Stadium, my dad was a Mets fan—a holdover National League fan from the 1950s before the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco and took my dad’s favorite player, Willie Mays. For my dad’s generation of Black men, Black baseball players, led by Jackie Robinson, Mays, Aaron and Frank Robinson, who would later become Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, were the realization of a world undergoing change.
When I first started watching baseball during the 1971 World Series, the sport was dominated by young Black ballplayers. The 1971 Pirates, who won the series that year, were the Blackest team in the league, in both style and substance, featuring future hall- of-famers Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente (whose running style everybody wanted to imitate), Dock Ellis, who the year before pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD, Al Oliver and Rennie Stennent. Not interested in political issues, the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were my dad’s version of Black Power and he made sure I understood the significance of their ascendance as champions.
I was hooked, as many of my peers were, this in the era before the NBA had become an international brand and the New York Knicks were derisively described as the New York “N----r-bockers.” Part of the appeal was that many of the best baseball players in the 1970s and early 1980s were Black, and they were fundamentally changing the way the game was being played, whether talking about Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson on the base paths, Rod Carew, whose .388 batting average in 1977 was the highest in thirty years and Reggie Jackson, who became Mr. October.
Black dominance in professional baseball made sense in the 1970s, as the era marked the high-water mark of the percentage of Black players in the Major Leagues. For many kids in the hood, baseball was still a sport that could get you out of the hood, into college, the minor leagues and possible the majors. But something has happened along the way.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
