Robinson Cleared a Path, but Fewer Are Following His Lead

And by the time money was appropriated, it was too late. Black kids wanted to be like Mike. He had a shoe, and a logo. Tony Gwynn, great as he was, didn't have either. Neither, then, did Barry Bonds. "LeBron never played a minute of professional basketball, yet had a $90 million contract from Nike," Solomon said.

Now that Major League Baseball has restored fields from Compton, Calif., to Brooklyn and spread seed money all over the country, African American kids aren't interested. Baseball "takes too long" and "there's not enough action" and "it's too complicated." Scouts talk of going to tournaments and seeing plenty of Hispanic players, black and white, but sometimes no African Americans. A couple of summers ago, I went back to the park I grew up in, West Chatham Park on the South Side of Chicago, where we played baseball until somebody's parents made us come home.

Nobody was playing. Kids sat two deep in a ring around the basketball court, but the baseball diamonds -- three of them, as I recall -- were empty, unlined, not mowed.

So I asked Solomon -- who oversaw the building of the MLB Urban Youth Academy in Compton, which has attracted 2,000 kids since it opened 14 months ago -- what in the world MLB is going to do, even though MLB isn't in my mind part of the problem.

"Basketball rides the backs of the shoe companies when it comes to marketing," he said. "But baseball will have to market itself. We have to find a way to raise the profile of African American players, make them cool. . . . Ryan Howard, Dontrelle Willis, Torii Hunter. . . . We've got to find a way from a business and social standpoint to raise their profiles. Ryan Howard was rookie of the year one year, then MVP the next. Who does that? But do African American children know him? And how do we market without exposing ourselves to the pitfalls of what happens with the individual player? There's a little trepidation."

Yes, the shoe companies (and as a result, the NBA) have found that out the hard way. Basketball markets the individual, which can be risky.

Baseball markets the game, which black kids don't know and aren't attracted to.

"It's a generational sport," Solomon said. "Your dad or your granddad or uncle explained all the nuances to you, the game within a game, how to fill out a scorecard. . . . The game was passed down. Well, we've lost a generation of teachers because of all the new interests."

Sadly, depending on your perspective, the game is being passed over instead of passed down. The Urban Youth Academy already has produced a couple of kids headed for the majors, including one, who is white, drafted in the first round.

But it's fair to wonder whether we, African Americans, ever will embrace baseball the way we once did, whether we'll love it, obsess over it the way Robinson and Mays and Aaron did, whether we'll see the powerful and skilled Ryan Howard as an American sporting hero or somebody who plays a sport that was important to us once upon a time.