Sometimes things just aren’t for you. It happens. Take, for instance, soccer. I hate it. Soccer and I have a rocky relationship every year. As a sportswriter and photographer, I’ve covered more high school and college soccer matches than I can count and one thing is universal about every match I’ve ever watched or covered. I’d always rather be doing something else. I can appreciate the athleticism involved and in the rare instances where something actually does happen, it can be pretty spectacular. Soccer isn’t my thing. Neither is MMA or competitive fishing or dressage horse dancing. They don’t have to fix those sports to get my attention. They don’t have to change the rules to invite me to the party. I’m RSVPing right now. I’m not coming.
A few weeks ago Chris Rock was on Real Sports with Bryant Gumble, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Anytime you think of Bryant Gumble, you automatically think of Chris Rock.
Besties? Sure. Glued together at the hip? Obviously. So simpatico that each man could easily replace the other at his job? No question about it as Gumble’s “Black that Ass Up” performance at the Apollo Theater for BET in 1998 can attest.
In his Real Sports segment, Rock decried baseball’s lack of appeal to young black people.
“I’m an endangered species, a black baseball fan,” Rock said. “Why don’t black people like baseball anymore?”
He throws out some statistics that I won’t argue with because I don’t care. I will say that saying the San Francisco Giants won the World Series without any black players probably came as quite a shock to Joaquin Arias and Santiago Casilla.
Rock thinks baseball’s race problem is really a coolness problem. If baseball would just add some celebrations and showboating to their sport, maybe more young people might tune in.
Here’s the Chicago Cubs Junior Lake trying to implement one of Rock’s suggestions. Let’s see how it goes over.
Both benches cleared because Lake gave a “shush” gesture. And you know his own teammates were like, “Junior. We’re coming out, but if you get clocked one good time, that’s OK.”
When I first decided to write about this, I asked Cubs minor league catcher Willson Contreras what he thought about showboating and if it was allowed in Venezuela. The very nature of the question made his eyes go wide.
“No,” he said. “You do that, you’re going to get hit. We play the right way.”
The “right way” isn’t the “white way.” It’s a code and it’s one that all baseball players, outside of South Korea at least, abide by. It doesn’t matter if we’d like to see Kris Bryant do a salsa dance at the plate, nobody he plays with or against does and he’d be on his way to the hospital after his next at-bat.
Little League participation hasn’t fallen 20 percent because kids don’t want to play baseball. It’s fallen because my generation of parents hated playing Little League for some wash-out ex high school baseball star who yelled at us like a drill sergeant. Kids don’t play as much because their X-Box and Playstation is a lot more fun than sucking at a kid’s sport.
No kid that’s fantastic at baseball isn’t playing baseball. It’s the kids that are just wasting space that aren’t there because they never wanted to be there to begin with. Now, we just don’t force them to go.
Stadiums price the casual fan out of showing up to a game, not just the ticket, but parking and food. You take your kid to a major league ballpark, you’re dropping $200 easy. And he’s still getting those Jordans Rock brings up in the video.
These kind of things are cyclical and all it will take for young black fans to get interested in the sport is a young, high profile black player capturing the nation’s attention. Golf had a “race problem” until Tiger Woods showed up. Tennis had a “race problem” until Serena and Venus Williams hit the court. That’s all you need. Somebody fun to watch that you can identify with. Baseball doesn’t have that right now, but it will. We could see him show up any day.
Or, as Varys on Game of Thrones said to Tyrion Lannister after they’d escaped King’s Landing, “Who said anything about ‘him?’’
