Daniel Johnson
    Sports Editor

Scene: A man in his early forties is laying on his bed. The man is a bit husky, bald, African American, and he wears shorts despite the fact his legs are as dry as a raisin. It is the summer and the air conditioner is on. He is positioned on the edge of the bed, spread out like an elder lion resting. His eyes are fixated on the television. The TV is a dark-black, older television with a VCR player on top of it. The man is a father, and atop him are three young boys. The boys place their heads on the father’s body like a pillow. The eldest has his head on the father’s shoulder. The second son on his ribs, leaving the baby with his hip.

This was essentially my summer for five years. And on the television, there was always a baseball game.

My family is a baseball family. Now, that is not saying we did not watch or play other sports because we did (check the broken windows and football shaped holes in the wall as proof of that), but all of our first sports played was baseball. We did not go to New York Giants and Knicks games as a kid, but Yankees and Mets games. During the summer, we played baseball in the front yard and cleaned ourselves off by jumping into the pool. I have been to more Mets games than I can count and I still hold onto all the baseball cards I collected as a kid. Still, even as a kid, I always noticed my teams’ demographic in any sport I played.

In the community football league I played in for two years, there was clearly more black and hispanic kids on the roster than white players. Basketball was the same, with the ratio being about two to one between African American and white players. For baseball, on the other hand, this was not the case. When I first started playing at six years old, the teams were about even between race and nationality. However, each year played, the number of African Americans on the team decreased until there were about three to four non-whites on the roster. By the time I got to high school, for two out of the four seasons I played, I was the only African American on the roster, which was something I was warned about by my brother.

My eldest brother played AAU baseball for three seasons and traveled around the Northeast with his traveling team. He talked about going to tournaments where you could count the number of black players on one hand. The higher level of baseball you play, the more white the teams get.

Now, I do not want to give the illusion that I faced racism on the field. No one threw bananas at me in the outfield. Pitchers did not headhunt when I was at bat. A guy slid into my knees once… after I had whacked him on the head with my mit on first base. I still talk to my old teammates and coaches today. But that does not mean I didn’t get the occasional racial joke now and then. I’d come to practice with sunscreen and my teammates would joke, “You worried about a sunburn?” I wore #24 because I loved Ken Griffey Jr. and I heard that maybe the numbers should be reversed to make 42. But whatever they said to me, I said back to them. I robbed a home run in practice and joked to them that they couldn’t jump high enough to catch the ball. We played basketball on a team trip and humiliated them on the court, and we played football in gym and I humiliated them there, too. Like I said, I played a lot of sports growing up.

The one joke that annoyed me did not come from my teammates; it came from students who called me white for playing baseball. First of all, I could beat these kids in any athletic competition we competed in. Secondly, when did baseball become a white sport? I get a sport like hockey or NASCAR being called a “white sport,” but baseball is very diverse. Though African American involvement in the MLB is in the single digits, combined with the Asian and Latino players, this make up close to forty percent with the game. My favorite players growing up were Mike Piazza, a white guy, and Ken Griffey Jr., a black guy.

The idea of placing a label on a sport is not only insulting, but it is exclusive to people not in that race. Does this make basketball a “black sport” because the majority of players in college and the NBA are African American? Well, my favorite basketball player is Dirk Nowitzki, a seven-foot-tall white guy from Germany, so it safe to say I never cared about race in sports.