Fans look down from their seats onto the baseball field, see dark-colored skin and might assume they are African-American players. But increasingly, the players instead hail from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico or Venezuela.
“People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they’re African American,” Los Angeles Angels center fielder Torii Hunter says. “They’re not us. They’re impostors.
“Even people I know come up and say, ‘Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?’ I say, ‘Come on, he’s Dominican. He’s not black.’ ”
“As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us,” Hunter says. “It’s like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It’s like, ‘Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?’
“I’m telling you, it’s sad.”
The notion that the number of U.S.-born black players in Major League Baseball has declined is manifest. There are any number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that U.S.-born black kids are more likely to play basketball or football than baseball these days. As a baseball nut this bugs me because there are likely a dozen black kids playing second string safety in the SEC or someplace who could have been ten times the ballplayer than many of the guys on your team’s roster. Indeed, if only a handful of black athletes chose to play baseball instead of basketball or football guys like Mike Jacobs would be working at a Jiffy Lube right now, and no one would be upset about that except for some Jiffy Lube manager. I’m greedy: I want all the best athletes playing baseball and I’m bummed when they don’t.
But this notion that today’s diversity in baseball is some sort of sham and that black Dominican players are “impostors” is beyond repugnant. No, they’re not from the U.S., but if Jose Reyes and Vladimir Guerrero aren’t black, I’m not sure anyone is.
The fact that more and more of baseball’s black players happen to come from a couple hundred miles south of an artificial political border doesn’t mean that there is no one around to receive the torch passed down from Jackie Robinson, nor does the fact that baseball has spent millions to develop Latin American talent mean that the sport has turned its back on U.S.-born blacks. And while, like Hunter, I’d like to see more U.S. blacks playing the game, to suggest, as he does, that Major League Baseball has some plot to overlook them in favor of international players is plain dumb. If anything baseball would love to have it the opposite way. After all, U.S.-born blacks are subject to the draft and can be paid peanuts for years. Dominican or Venezuelan players get big signing bonuses. At least the good ones do.
Hunter’s comments speak to our nation’s profound immaturity when it comes to race. A mindset that makes rigid and often artificial census categories like “black” and “Hispanic” take on much more significance than is warranted and causes us to lose sight of what’s really important. What’s important in my view? The big picture: baseball is a truly international, multi-ethnic game in ways that, say, American football will never be, and that if there’s a meritocracy anywhere in this country, it’s in professional sports.
Like Hunter I’d love to see more U.S. blacks in the game and strongly support and encourage baseball’s efforts to make that happen. But claiming that the diversity baseball has successfully cultivated is somehow illegitimate or phony is simply pathetic