D.C.'s Major Player

"I was so upset," he said. "I knew I was good enough. I'm not saying I was major league-ready, but I was ready to go play rookie ball. I would have been happy being a 50th-rounder."

By that time, Burriss had played on travel teams that competed in tournaments in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania -- some of which had scouts present. Not that it mattered. He doesn't recall a single one speaking to him, even though by then it was clear he was the best player on most of his teams.

"But I'm sure they just looked at my profile and said, 'Oh, he's just a black kid from D.C., just a fast kid -- a one-tool player. He doesn't know. He's just running. Oh, yeah, he made that play at shortstop, but he doesn't really know what he's doing,' " Burriss said. "It was a combination of race and where I'm from."

* * *

'I'm a Baseball Guy'

Last year, the percentage of black players in Major League Baseball dropped to 8.2 percent, down from 19 percent as recently as 1995, and -- despite MLB's efforts, with its Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program -- no one seems quite sure how to halt the decline, the roots of which are tangled up in the country's larger economic and societal problems. Washington's failure to produce big leaguers is not unique; they aren't coming out of inner-city Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago or Detroit either.

"Kids aren't stupid," Burriss said. "They don't want to play on a bad field with bad equipment, when it's so easy to go play basketball on a blacktop. How hard is it to keep a blacktop in good shape? All you need is a broom."

But McCarthy, who operates three youth-oriented baseball outreach programs, thinks the issue is more complex. One of his programs, Béisbol y Libros, transports Washington area coaches and players each summer to the Dominican Republic to conduct camps, and there he encounters kids with equipment and facilities that are far worse than what is available in the District.

"And yet, their desire and determination overcomes that," McCarthy said. "In Washington, most kids play other sports -- and that's great. Kids should play what they want to play. But there's also the fact Washington, like other cities, is battling serious social problems, and producing great athletes is not always a priority for families. Nine percent of D.C. public high school kids go on to graduate from college. So we're not producing big league talent in academics, either."

Wills, who still returns to the District occasionally to teach baseball clinics, said: "If you don't start playing when you're 5 years old, for some reason it's too late. I'm not smart enough to explain it. But when I go back I can see they don't have that natural ability. When I was [with the Dodgers], I used to beg our scouts to go to D.C. -- because there was talent there."

But professional scouts were not the only people who ignored Burriss at Wilson High. He also received exactly zero scholarship offers from any of the colleges and universities in the area.

"If you're one of our local colleges, you've got to be saying to yourselves, 'How did we miss this young man?' " McCarthy said. "It was probably an indictment of their lack of effort. No college within a 200-mile radius wanted to offer him a scholarship? That seems kind of weak."