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Baseball: A job African
Americans won't do?
By Jean Damu
Jackie
Robinson must be weeping.
Earlier this
season nationwide festivities were held
to commemorate the 60th
anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s
integration of Major League Baseball. By
and large the events left a sour taste
because it was impossible to ignore the
obvious: African- Americans are becoming
an extinct species in MLB.
Even though a
variety of reasons have been offered up
to explain this phenomena-from Black
kids playing to many video games, to the
exorbitant costs of Little League
participation-close inspection reveals
the fundamental reason Black American
youth are disappearing from the MLB
diamonds is that congress is greasing
the skids by manipulating immigration
laws that now allow massive numbers of
lowly paid overseas apprentice (minor
league, developmental) players to
legally flow into the US.
Ironically
the practice of going overseas,
specifically to the Dominican Republic
for apprentice baseball players, was
necessitated by the onset of baseball’s
free agency agreement that ushered in
skyrocketing salaries. This encouraged
teams in smaller, less lucrative markets
to find ways to cut player development
costs, costs which can run into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars per
player.
No team was
more aggressive or more successful in
recruiting lowly paid apprentice
baseball players in the Dominican
Republic than the Oakland A’s, a
perennial baseball success story that
resides in what is considered one of
MLB’s smallest, least lucrative markets.
In a 1997
Sacramento Bee story Ron Plaza , who was
then a roving instructor for the A’s
said, “When we first went to the
Dominican Republic in the 1980’s, we
signed a lot of guys because we wanted
to have our own squad because we didn’t
want to co-op with another team. A lot
of mistakes were made and we weren’t
sending the caliber of player (that was
going to be successful.) It was
unfortunate.”
In reality,
however, it didn’t really matter whether
the players made it to the major leagues
or not. Despite what they had been told
by the major league baseball scouts most
of the Dominicans are brought here to
help train those who will make it to the
big leagues.
Dick
Balderson of the Colorado Rockies
described the Dominican recruiting
strategy as the “boatload” mentality.”
Instead of signing four (American) guys
at $25,000 each, you sign 20 Dominican
guys at $5,000 each,” he said. Balderson
is currently VP in charge of baseball
operations for the Rockies.
Defending
this strategy, Sandy Alderson who was
then the longtime general manager of the
A’s and is now general manager of the
San Diego Padre’s said, “It’s a reaction
to the cost of player development in the
US. Part of that cost relates to the
escalation of free agent salaries and
increases in signing bonuses at the
amateur level.
“If you are
developing two or three players from
traditional domestic sources and you can
add just one player to that resource
pool every year, then in effect you’ve
increased your productivity,” Alderson
said.
But that was
ten years ago and the ruling class of
MLB, the owners, decided that the
immigration laws, which limited each
team to 26 visas per year was too
limiting.
In a little
unnoticed move last year Congress, which
already grants to MLB exemption from all
anti-trust legislation, passed the
“Creating Opportunities For Minor League
Professionals, Entertainers and Teams
Through Legal Entry Act of 2006.”
This change
in the immigration law, passed by
Congress after heavy lobbying of the
legislators and the State Dept. by MLB,
now allows foreign born minor league
players to upgrade from H-2B visas to
P-1 Visas, which until last year had
been restricted just to major league
players.
Under the
H-2B visa program, to which most
industries must conform, each team was
only allowed 26 visas per year. By
upgrading minor league players to P-1
visas each team may now annually import
an unlimited number of minor league
players.
This despite
the fact that immigration laws
specifically state these requirements
may not be implemented unless no
Americans can be found who will perform
the job.
It should be
easy enough to see the meaning of all
this—that within a few years
organizations like the Milwaukee
Brewers, who have not one African
American on their roster, will become
the norm, rather than an anomaly.
Baseball
offers a clear and true allegory of the
negative effects of globalization upon
the weakest sectors of society. African
American youth are the first to be
discarded by baseball. Others will be
discarded later.
In February
of this year the New York Yankees and
MLB sent a delegation to the People’s
Republic of China to contract with
Chinese Baseball Assn. to provide
equipment and training. A similar
delegation from the Mets traveled to
West Africa in MLB’s apparent drive to
develop other, cheaper sources of labor.
Questions
abound. In 20 years will Dominicans also
be discarded as too expensive? Will
white players become as expendable as
Detroit autoworkers? What does the
baseball players union have to say about
this? As the most militant of all the
professional sports unions will it react
at some point to the globalization of
its industry? Stay tuned.
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Jean Damu is a member of the Black alliance
for Just Immigration. He can be reached
at
jdamu2@yahoo.com
updated 24 February 2008 |
