On blacks and baseball
SIXTY YEARS ago, I became a Red Sox fan. Unbenownst to me as a 9-year-old black sandlot player, the Sox were a bastion of segregation.
In 1986, I complained about this era in Red Sox history and how it had disadvantaged the club in its then-unredeemed search for a world championship. On Opening Day 1986, I wrote in the Globe about how the Red Sox had passed on their chance to get Jackie Robinson before the sagacious Branch Rickey brought him to Brooklyn. Those memories were renewed by Tommy Harper's 1986 exclusion from a segregated Florida Elks Club patronized by the Red Sox and racial discrimination charges filed against the team, a matter subsequently obscured by the team's near-miss in the infamous New York City sixth game.
This year is different. The Sox, the last team to hire a black player, in 1959, and one that has never had a black manager, is reaching out to the African-American community, with scholarships and several events throughout the season. A black center fielder, Coco Crisp, will patrol the terrain once occupied by ''the little professor" Dom DiMaggio in a way that will make fans forget heartthrob Johnny Damon. Even Harper has been in a Sox uniform twice since 1986.
Indeed, Sox management did the right thing last year in penalizing the Red Sox fans who scuffled with black superstar Gary Sheffield of the hated New York Yankees. Contrast that with just a few years earlier when a fan taunted Red Sox first baseman George Scott as a ''slave" and virtually all in attendance, including myself, sat silent.
So the Sox are no longer more backward than the rest of baseball. In some respects, they are forward thinking. To the extent that there is a racial problem in baseball-- and there is -- it is a problem that permeates all of baseball, not just the Sox.
Less than 10 percent of Major League Baseball players today are black Americans, down from 27 percent in 1975.
The exciting and talented Latino players, notably David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez, now constitute almost 30 percent of all players at the top of the ladder. Baseball's globalization has meant more recruitment of Latino players from baseball academies filled with young and hungry aspirants, a relatively inexpensive substitute for big amateur signing bonuses and the ever-escalating salaries attributable to free agency. But make no mistake about it: Baseball is the better for globalization.
But all of this, no matter how positive for the game, cannot divert attention from the fact that baseball has moved backward from Jackie Robinson's breakthrough. Most black American athletes at the professional level play football or basketball -- and most get there by playing in college, just as a substantial number do in baseball. Last year, the colleges in the Final Four in basketball offered 10 times as many basketball athletic scholarships as were available in the College World Series Final Four. The black youngster who hopes for a free ride through an athletic scholarship cannot seriously consider baseball, given the opportunities available in football and basketball.
And then there is lack of blacks in management in baseball. The New York Mets' Willie Randolph constitutes baseball's sole breakthrough for blacks at the managerial level during the past year.
True, baseball has required teams to interview minorities. But before he was hired by the Mets, Randolph was asked by another team whether he could be interviewed over the telephone so as to create the appearance of compliance with affirmative action standards. This is not too far from the Red Sox's 1945 refusal to consider Robinson when he and his colleagues heard someone shout, ''Get the niggers off the field" in their Fenway tryout.
So 2006 is not 1946, the year in which a 9-year-old black fell in love with the team. But the basic inequity remains.
William B. Gould IV, a Stanford law professor and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, will throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park on Saturday, when baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson. 
