Don’t Be Shocked If MLB Strikes Out Jackie Robinson Day With DEI Fastball

Jackie Robinson Day?

It’s going, going, almost gone.

And since Major League Baseball officials are sprinting in that direction faster than Rickey Henderson – oops, it’s too DEI to mention baseball’s all-time leader in stolen bases who happened to be African American, so let’s say the generic guy on the MLB logo – why would those baseball officials stop there?

After 28 years, they might as well unretire Robinson’s No. 42 for their 30 teams, you know, just to make sure the U.S. government doesn’t unleash its considerable wrath on their industry that they said made a record $12.1 billion last season, up from $11.6 billion in 2023.

President Donald Trump’s new adminstration isn’t into diversity. There even was a moment earlier this week when the Department of Defense ripped a page from its website on Robinson’s biographical information involving his Army service during World War II.

Robinson was Rosa Parks 11 years before Rosa Parks.

Instead of Montgomery, Alabama, where Parks refused to sit in the back of a city bus, Robinson’s setting was Fort Hood in Texas, where he was court-martialed for refusing to leave the front of an Army bus during the summer of 1944. He later was acquitted of the six counts, including insubordination, but the court-martial prevented him from deploying to fight in Europe with his battalion.

Robinson’s military duty and civil rights heroics occurred before he broke baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

All of that Black history, which is American history, vanished in a flash Wednesday morning from the Department of Defense website, but it resurfaced later that day. Such wasn’t the case for other pages involving minorities and women, because the department said those pages violated the Trump administration’s edict against DEI, which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Our values on diversity remain unchanged,” MLB said through a statement released Friday, two days after the Department of Defense’s Robinson episode, but then came a curveball from those baseball officials that was vintage Ferguson Jenkins.

Oh, I’m sorry. Since that former Chicago Cubs pitching ace is African American, I guess I should say baseball’s curveball in its statement after “diversity remain unchanged” was vintage generic guy on the MLB logo.

As for that curveball, MLB officials claimed they had to scrub references to “diversity” from the homepage of their website announcing careers in the industry. They cited Trump’s executive order that they said may trigger federal action against organizations using DEI programs in violation of his administration’s interpretation of civil rights law.

So after that opening sentence in the statement suggested baseball would keep delivering fastballs from its generic guy on the MLB logo (I almost slipped by saying Bob Gibson) regarding its pursuit of minorities, baseball officials responded with that curveball: “We are in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward.”

Huh?

Among other things, MLB officials are hinting of announcing with sad eyes, of course, that in order to stay within the law, they will not have baseball’s annual Jackie Robinson Day on April 15.

Jackie Robinson Day would end, period.

Not that I would be upset.

Baseball’s celebration of that day often obscures the fact that MLB hasn’t been African American friendly in decades.

When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner during the 1980s, I did a significant dive into Blacks in baseball, and I discovered African Americans went from representing around 27% of the players throughout the Major Leagues during the mid-1970s to 18% in 1982.

I was closer to baseball legend Hank Aaron than any other reporter, which I discussed in my book called “The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King.” Hank told me back then that due to what he saw as growing indifference by MLB officials and team owners toward African Americans compared to foreign-born players, he said the number of African American players in baseball would drop below 10% in the 21st century.

For Opening Day 2024, it was 6%.

Elswehere in the Major Leagues, Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Ron Washington of the Los Angeles Angels are the only two African American managers, and Dana Brown of the Houston Astros is the only African American general manager.

Even so, MLB officials keep saying they’ve tried so hard to bring more minorities into the game (BTW: using the word “minorities” instead of “African American” makes the numbers sound larger), and Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred keeps boasting of implementing a diversity baseball pipeline in 2016.

That was so nine years ago.

Weeks before the Department of Defense either directly or indirectly fired that warning shot toward MLB with the Robinson/website thing, Manfred told baseball owners during a meeting in Palm Beach, Florida that “our values, particularly our values on diversity, remain unchanged, but another value that is pretty important to us is we always try to comply with what the law is.”

Then Manfred added, “There seems to be an evolution going on here. We’re following that very carefully. Obviously, when things get a little more settled, we’ll examine each of our programs and make sure that while the values remain the same that we’re also consistent with what the law requires.”

Uh huh.

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

A nation used to turn its lonely eyes to you.