Woods: From MLB to little league, diversity dwindling among baseball players
From Alden Woods at the Arizona Republic on March 23, 2019:
Chancellor Brewington was barely a teenager when he first felt baseball didn’t have room for him. He was a middle-school shortstop with Major League ambitions, going to games with his father and looking for somebody who shared his skin color.
“Is that a black guy?” he remembered asking his dad when a dark-skinned player walked past.
His dad, retired MLB pitcher and then-Pirates scout Jamie Brewington, shook his head. That player was Venezuelan. The next was Cuban. Another was Dominican.
African-American players, he knew, rarely reached that level anymore.
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But Chancellor never felt like he fully belonged in baseball. He was the only black kid on most of his Little League teams. At Hamilton, he walked the hallways and wished he could fit in with the football players. Then he joined the team and found a comfort that baseball couldn’t provide. Hamilton’s baseball coaches moved him to right field, and Chancellor felt slighted. College scouts came to his games, and he worried that a single mistake would overshadow all his talent.
Read the full article here: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-best-reads/2019/03/23/major-league-baseball-diversity-black-players-little-league-hamilton-high-school/3134908002/
- Related link: Read “Baseball Demographics Since 1947,” by Mark Armour
Originally published: March 25, 2019. Last Updated: March 25, 2019.