Playing the Percentages
Yesterday marked the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier. While baseball celebrated, baseball pundits fretted over the news that 8.2% of the league's players are black. Maybe it's just me being me, but I fail to see the problem here. I wasn't aware that sports (and who knows what else) should be controlled by some kind of quota system. African-Americans are 12.2% of the American population, so does that mean baseball has to mirror that breakdown? Why isn't 8.2% enough?
Are the people wringing their hands over the lack of African-American participation in baseball likewise devising elaborate strategies to keep "overrepresented" Latinos out of the game? Are the Milwaukee Brewers trying to break it to star Ryan Braun that he can't play because teams "should" only be .35% Jewish?
Of course not. We tend to reject quotas because they violate our sense of fairness to the individual. Quota is a dirty word - and rightly so.
So what's going on? I point my finger at sportswriters. They want to be "real" reporters so when they get a chance to dig into what they see as "hard" news they take it (and make a HUGE deal of it). That's why sports news gets dominated by non-sports stories like steroid use, Tibet, contracts, Jessica Simpson and Cheatriots. That's "news". That's a story. That's where the glory is, baby.
Posted by at April 16, 2008 02:55 PM
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| # April 16th, 2008 8:16 PM TheUnabrewer |
| Yet you never see this conversation about the NBA. |