The Myth of Integration in MLB
Major League Baseball cannot celebrate the Negro Leagues without acknowledging the role it played in destroying them
It has officially been 100 years since Rube Foster founded the first incarnation of the Negro Leagues. Droves have joined in the centennial celebration. Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) president Bob Kendrick’s “Tip Your Cap Campaign” has gone viral on social media, gaining attention from presidents, athletes, and celebrities alike.
Earlier this year, Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) agreed to make a joint $1,000,000 donation to the NLBM. The league also scheduled a slate of commemorative events before the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to adjust their schedule.
There’s a lot worth celebrating from the Negro Leagues’ history. MLB’s exclusion of Black players allowed the Negro Leagues access to some of the best baseball players in history. The retrospectives provide a focus on many of the stars robbed of opportunity and wealth by discrimination.
Negro League players deserve the adulation they’ve received, but the narrative often merges the Negro Leagues with MLB as partners. The story generally ends with the moment Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier. It implies MLB finally learned its lesson and accepted Black people as worthy of equal opportunities.
Of course, this is a difficult idea to reconcile with what transpired over the following decades. It took years before any Black coaches or general managers were hired and the league has yet to see a Black majority owner. Furthermore, Black representation in the league has consistently decreased since its peak in the 1980s.
Many problems in baseball persist today. Last week, Colorado Rockies outfielder Ian Desmond shared a scathing indictment of the culture in MLB clubhouses. Desmond, a biracial man, detailed his decision not to play in the pandemic shortened season alongside his own reflections on Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.
He talks about playing on a Little League team where players yelled “‘White Power!’” before games. Desmond calls out MLB clubhouses for being filled with “racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes” while adding “We’ve got a minority issue from the top down. One African American GM. Two African American managers. Less than 8% Black players. No Black majority team owners.”
Desmond’s post exposes a harsh reality for MLB: the league needs major change if it cares about equality. That starts with an honest acknowledgement of its history.
Jackie Robinson may be the most celebrated figure today, but his story illustrates what integration in baseball (and in countless other fields) meant. Integration in the United States implies equality. In professional baseball, integration was a tool to further delay racial equity.
When the Negro Leagues were founded by Rube Foster in 1920, he envisioned a world without segregation in baseball. Foster foresaw a world where Black and white players would play in the same league. As William C. Rhoden wrote in his book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, “Foster’s vision was to see entire black franchises admitted [to MLB], as well as individual players” (111).
The NFL/AFL and NBA/ABA mergers have been seminal moments for both leagues. Decades before, Foster envisioned an even more powerful MLB/Negro Leagues merger.
Foster understood that players weren’t the only people excluded from MLB. Black owners, general managers, coaches, scouts, and secretaries were just as reliant on Negro League baseball for opportunities as Black players. MLB’s discrimination kept all of them out of the league.
Not only would Foster’s plan have aligned well with MLB’s future expansion, it would have also represented true institutional integration at all levels of the league.
When Foster proposed this plan to American League president Ban Johnson and legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw in 1926 however, his proposal was ignored. Reportedly, “McGraw apparently told Foster that the time was not right for an African American presence in Major League Baseball” (Rhoden 112).
A merger would never come for MLB and the Negro Leagues. Yet, we rarely discuss what the league lost by doing so. Why is the proposition of a MLB/Negro Leagues merger foreign to us? Perhaps because America’s largest fear remains Black access to institutional power.
Prior to the hostile takeover of Black baseball by MLB, white team owners still exploited it for their own profits. Few Negro League organizations had the access to capital necessary to build their own stadiums. Part of this was explained by the wealth gap propagated by slavery and Jim Crow era policies, but white banks’ refusal to lend also played a pivotal role in who was able to claim ownership of long-term assets.
Without stadium ownership, Negro League teams had to rent from MLB owners who received “rich dividends” (114) according to Rhoden. Even amidst segregation, MLB owners profited from Black exclusion.
When teams were finally open to signing Black players, a merger was not on the table. Even then, Negro League teams were not as respected as their white independent league counterparts.
Branch Rickey himself, the man heralded for orchestrating Jackie Robinson‘s move to MLB, undermined the Negro Leagues at every turn. Per Rhoden, Rickey said “There is no Negro League as such as far as I’m concerned” and “[the Negro Leagues] have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them” (119).
Rickey’s approach to the Negro Leagues would model how they would be treated until the last league played its final games in 1951. In effect, Rickey and MLB killed the Negro Leagues. Not through integration, but through exclusionary business practices.
At this time, prior to the expansion of MLB’s minor league apparatus, players played with independent league teams until a big-league organization wanted to sign them. Generally, the team would have to wait until the player’s independent league contract expired unless they compensated the team for the player’s rights.
Many independent league clubs remained financially viable by fostering big-league talent to be purchased by MLB organizations. In the aftermath of Robinson’s signing, many Black players were signed by big-league organizations without any compensation for Negro League teams.
As Rhoden explained, “A black institution was dead, while a white institution grew richer and stronger. This was the end result of integration” (121).
Once in the major leagues, Black players continued facing economic discrimination. Michael Haupert, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, has done extensive research on MLB salaries for white and and Black players after integration.
Haupert found it was much harder for Black players to make a team when compared to their white counterparts. The reality was plain and simple — according to Haupert, “the average black player had to be better than the average white player to make the team.”
Even if they made the roster, the discrimination they faced didn’t end. Haupert found salary discrimination that compensated white players with higher salaries based on experience while only compensating Black players after they had “proven themselves.”
Discrimination in baseball existed at every level. There was never a point where discrimination ceased.
White America has never been interested in discussing the truth of discrimination. Neither was Major League Baseball. If MLB was challenged on their discriminatory policies, Black stars would be presented as the example of acceptance.
The positive value of Robinson and other Black MLB players’ presence for American culture is undeniable, but they were still victims of MLB’s exploitationist tokenism. The league profited from their play while using them as shields against legitimate claims of discrimination.
Tragically, Rube Foster created a model not just for Black baseball, but for American baseball in 1920. Foster’s vision was true integration, in the way we imagine it occurred today. White institutions, like MLB, chose sacrificing equality and the good of the sport for their self-interest.
Once again, white America was allowed to continue ignoring Black institutions and focus entirely on Black individuals. MLB had an opportunity to place the responsibility on racists to accept Black people. Instead the burden of integration was put on players like Robinson to withstand a hateful culture.
The league has never recovered from these racist realities. Even with the decline in numbers of Black MLB players, they still represent a larger portion of the player pool than that of coaches, management, and ownership.
Desmond’s experience and frustration with baseball can be traced to the decision not just to exclude Black players for the first 47 years of the 20th century, but the choice thereafter to deny Black people access to baseball as an institution. This reality permeates every level of the sport.
Just two years ago, Shakeia Taylor wrote in FanGraphs about the substantial financial barriers to Little League Baseball and its disproportionate effect on minorities. Last week, Rob Arthur found statistical evidence of racial bias in minor league promotions that BIPOC players were 3–4% less likely to advance than their equally productive white counterparts.
In MLB front-offices, the booming Ivy League pipeline, investigated by ESPN’s Joon Lee, has acted as another exclusionary barrier to entry. The league’s shift to analytics and a hedge fund approach to team management has impeded minorities’ ability to gain front-office positions.
The Ivy Leagues haven’t been the only pipelines to emerge. Tiny Haverford College has become a niche producer of front-office employees as well. According to their admissions page, just 8% of their Class of 2020 identifies as Black.
We’ve seen that trend pass down to managers. Predominantly white, analytically inclined front-offices tend to hire coaches they believe speak the same language as them. That leads them to hire people that remind them of themselves. Generally speaking, that means greater opportunities for white coaches and fewer for those like Ron Washington as detailed by The Undefeated’s Clinton Yates.
Indeed we should tip our caps to the Negro Leagues. We should support the incredible work done by the entire team at the Negro League Baseball Museum. We just shouldn’t stop there.
We all lost something when the Negro Leagues died. We didn’t have to either. MLB chose maintaining a white monopoly over baseball in place of embracing a truly integrated future.
Professional baseball has still failed to achieve racial equity 100 years after the founding of the Negro Leagues. It is willing to celebrate what the leagues were. Now it’s time to realize what MLB could be if it reimagined its history with the Negro Leagues as a partner.
