HEADS UP – MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL IS NOT RACIST AND DOESN’T NEED A WALKER

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African Americans, Baseball

I’m a baseball fan. Several myths have developed about baseball that need to be challenged. Baseball announcers and sports media personalities in general tend be bandwagon hoppers. One guy says that the average age of a baseball fan is somewhere in the fifties (pick a number, it changes), and that becomes a Greek chorus. A recent poll asked people what sports they were fans of. The NFL led with 60%, then MLB with 47%, then college football, ice skating, and the NBA. So baseball is still a very popular sport. What is true is that the average age of a person who watches a baseball game on TV is in the mid fifties. You can tell that by the Viagra commercials. I’m an old retired guy. I potter around in the garden or run errands most mornings, and then watch baseball in the afternoons and evenings. There are about 20 games per week on my TV, and maybe I watch 10 of them. A kid in school with tons of homework or a young professional with a full time job, a wife, and young kids, might be able to watch a game or two per week. Yet we are each one fan. I’m not ten fans. All you have to do is watch the camera pan the stands at an MLB game or a spring training game. There are a lot of kids there, even babies and toddlers. Half the stadium would have to be occupied by people well into their eighties to average out in the mid fifties. Another point often made is that baseball fans, presumably we are still talking about TV watchers, are skewing older. When I was a kid there was one game per week on TV, often watch by the whole family back when most people had Saturdays off. The number of games has increased steadily over the years. So the same logic applies to that as well. I think the number of games has probably reached its max at about twenty. So the skewing older should level off.

Another myth is that fewer blacks are playing in the majors. There are far and away more black players in the majors than there ever have been, just most of them are Hispanic, which isn’t a race last time I checked. And yes I know many Latinos are not black. It is the participation of African Americans that has declined dramatically, and that is a real shame, but it is not a race thing per se, but rather the result of socioeconomic factors and the difficulties of evaluating and predicting talent development. It will not be solved by allowing home plate shimmy dances or any number of crazy ideas to make the game more attractive to young African Americans. However they could speed things up some by conducting the play review process on site with an official in the booth. That official should start reviewing any close play immediately and not wait for a challenge. If there is no challenge, he/she doesn’t interfere. If challenged, she/he is already half way there. Another idea is reduce the number of relief pitcher changes by making a rule that if a pitcher is changed in the middle of an inning after facing only one batter, then that pitcher is ineligible for the next game. The manager could still do it but not without penalty, and I doubt he would do it three or four times in a game. It would be an added element of strategy.

Predicting whether a kid fresh out of high school will be a star in the majors is a total crap shoot, more than any other major sport. There are big fat guys and five foot two guys that are stars in the majors, guys drafted way down there who are in The Hall of Fame, and many a can’t miss guy who missed badly. There is rarely a sure thing player at the age of eighteen. Also potential injury is a larger concern in baseball than other sports. A kid right out of high school might take four or five years to reach the majors, if they reach it at all. Those are all non-remunerative injury risk years that the NFL and the NBA don’t encounter. I believe the NBA does have a development program for younger guys, but we are still talking a year or two with a far greater degree of certainty. So it is hard for kids just out of high school to demand huge signing bonuses from major league teams. That organic uncertainty makes baseball a less attractive choice for top young athletes who are now specializing in one sport at a younger and younger age. Frankly there is no solution for this problem that I can see. It is just the nature of things.  For the Latino players from the Caribbean, Mexico, and the northern rim of South America, baseball and in some countries soccer hold the only tickets out of poverty.

Because of the uncertainty factor in signing young kids, as well as great improvements in the quality of college baseball, increasingly the majors are signing players out of college. They are more mature with their talent further developed, and they are playing against high level completion in college these days. Baseball in the better conferences has been compared to double-A minor league baseball. It is at the college level that the majors could make an impact. Back in the sixties when I went to college, baseball was a sleepy side sport with rudimentary facilities. It was viewed as a summer sport which didn’t really fit the college agenda. Since then it has grown by leaps and bounds to become a big time college sport, but one still hampered by its small time past. The average college football team has 114 players and is allotted 85 full time scholarships. The average baseball team has 34 players and is allotted a maximum of 11.7 scholarships. Percentage wise quite a difference. As a result full time scholarships in college baseball are rare. Scholarships are divided up into halves, thirds, and even smaller proportions. It is not uncommon for the best player on a team to be a two-sport athlete with a scholarship in the other sport. It is easy to see why a great athlete pressured in junior high or even earlier to pick a sport to concentrate on might give baseball a pass. A half scholarship to Vanderbilt doesn’t do a poor kid any good. The initiatives undertaken by MLB to increase participation by inner city youth are commendable, but absent a solution to the scholarship problem, they will have limited impact.

Historically the majors have enjoyed a maximum participation rate among African Americans somewhere in the 15-18% range. Currently it stands at around 7.5%. Baseball will probably never again be the most popular sport among African Americans, but I have an idea that I think over time would restore that rate to historic levels. Baseball should negotiate a match grant program with the NCAA that would work as follows. Get the NCAA to increase its baseball scholarships to 13.7 per division one school. That works out to four additional half scholarships, which is the most common form for college baseball. Those four half scholarships would be match granted by the majors so as to provide full scholarships that would be limited to incoming freshmen and continuing as they matriculate. There are 240 division one baseball teams. The scholarships would be staggered in, one a year for each team over the first four years. After that you would just keep filling slots as they become available. Staggering would guarantee that each year there would be a pool of full scholarships available. The schools would administer the program. I estimate the cost at $5,000,000 – $6,000,000 the first year, increasing by the same amount each of the next three years until reaching a fully vetted total of $20,000,000 – $24,000,000 per annum, which is not peanuts but certainly doable by major league baseball, around $800,000 per team per year. The scholarships should have a need based qualification, not race based. Nevertheless, the certainty of 240 full scholarships available every year over time would attract the participation of some top young African American athletes and their parents.  Baseball does have some career advantages that should appeal to a growing African American middle class, such as less serious injury risk than football, and the contracts are guaranteed. Also longevity is a positive factor. You can collect big money into your late thirties and even early forties in baseball. I’m convinced that this or a similar program would make a difference over time in African American participation and interest in baseball. It would certainly be excellent PR, well worth the investment.

 

 

 

PHIL OCHS, THE UFO COFFEE HOUSE, AND ME

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Civil Rights, Free Speech, Student Protests, The Late Great Phil Ochs, The Turbulent Sixties, UFO Coffee House, University of South Carolina

I wrote most of this years ago, but I never published it. With all the recent discussion about freedom of speech, especially all the back patting about our reverence for it here in the US, I thought a little reality check down memory lane might be in order. I made some effort to check facts, but it wasn’t easy. As far as news coverage went in tumultuous 1968, these events were a couple grains of sand in a sandstorm. So this is written largely from personal memory. The saddest part of this sad story is that the people who govern South Carolina today are not significantly different from those who governed it then.

It was the bleak winter of 68/69, the end of a year notable for the disaster of the Democratic National Convention, the election of Nixon, heart ripping assassinations, the soul numbing daily Vietnam body counts, and the Orangeburg Massacre which occurred just 40 miles away from the University of South Carolina where I was a student. Everybody remembers Kent State where white students died, but how many people remember South Carolina State on February 8th, 1968 when three black students were killed and twenty-seven wounded, all shot in the back by police as they engaged in a peaceful protest because Orangeburg’s only bowling alley was whites only. So many were wounded because the police used shotguns, firing buckshot indiscriminately into the fleeing crowd.

It’s a small thing to mention, but a year or two later I was beaten bloody and unconcious after participating, just in passing, in an on campus civil rights protest, chatting with a few friends while somebody up front burned a Confederate flag. I was attacked from the bushes bordering the horseshoe’s sidewalk as I continued on with my arms full of books to the library. I never saw a thing, or if I did a concussion wiped it out. Two coeds heard the proud shout, “I got one of the N-lovers!” Then they watched a student kick me in the ribs as I was lying unconcious, before running off. Some hours later, face stitched up and shirt covered in blood, I filed the required paper work for assault at the campus police station.

Somehow word got out that the cops were holding me. Five or six cars full of freaks poured into the parking lot. Hippie/leftist white students at USC south called themselves “freaks” and called the majority conservative southern white students “grits.” I know, sounds West Side Storyish, except that there were nineteen grits to every freak. We each had our own uniforms: tie dye or peace sign t-shirts, army surplus shirts, navy peacoats, cutoffs, earth tone corduroy pants or bell-bottoms jeans, sandals or desert boots (aka shit kickers), and perhaps a whiff of marijuana for the male freaks; Gant shirts (the ones with the little hanger loop on the back pleat), alligator belts, plaid pleated slacks, penny loafers, loose knit pastel alpaca sweaters, and redolent quantities of Jade East cologne for the male grits. The northern students sometimes became freaks, but never grits, and sometimes they did their own black clothes, pale skin, Velvet Underground thing. We even held a Freak Day Festival once a year on campus, which, oddly, the university knowingly allowed. It featured joint rolling and brownie baking competitions among other fun events.

Anyway, the freaks began pounding their fists on the police cars, demanding my release. The cops didn’t know what to do. In those days campus cops did not resemble SWAT teams. They were more like mall cops. I went out and calmed things down, although it took some doing given my appearance. The cops seemed relieved, even grateful. However as expected the campus police made no effort to find my attacker, never even contacting me or the coed witnesses. A week or so later, the campus newspaper reported the protest and added: “One unidentified student was reportedly injured.” As I learned much later from an old HS football teammate who was playing for the Gamecocks, my assailant instantly became the toast of fraternity row. Eventually he flunked out, was drafted, and subsequently toured Vietnam.

So on a cold gray day I walked down Main St. in Columbia, past the State Capitol with its Confederate flag flying defiantly, past the prosperous stores, banks and offices, on up to the seedy tattered end of the street to the boarded up buildings where the homeless huddled and litter swirled. The USO was located there, and not by coincidence so was the UFO Coffee House. The UFO was off-limits to military personnel from nearby Fort Jackson. For a period they actually posted MPs outside. Absent the place being off-limits, probably some lonely soldiers would have visited it, since there were often coeds present. Usually the hippyish coeds were at least polite to soldiers when they encountered them on campus. From what I could tell, a pleasant chat with a pretty girl seemed to mean a lot to a lonely young soldier. Given the prevailing paranoia that any stranger could be a narc, especially one with short hair, things rarely advanced beyond that. However by contrast, the Suzy Creamcheese sorority girls who so strongly supported the war wouldn’t let a common soldier get within a football field of them. Come to think of it, they treated me pretty much the same way. So with its Che Guevara posters and socialist newspapers, the UFO was designed to irritate the powers that were, and it did. The owners were former students from up north. They didn’t serve alcohol or allow drugs in, instead they served coffee, tea, and a few New York specialties like Italian ices to homesick yankees and hippies. The clientele chatted, played chess, or read newspapers. Speed Limit 35, an excellent local blues/rock band sometimes played there on the weekends.

That night there was a small amateur poster on the door announcing Phil Ochs. The original price of seventy-five cents had been marked through and changed to fifty cents. So with thirty to forty kindred spirits I sat on the floor in front of a tiny stage and watched one of the great iconic performances of my life. Never before or since has person, place and time meshed so perfectly. A cigarette dangling James Dean character in a navy peacoat walked on stage and sang naively, idealistically, forcefully, defiantly, disappointedly, and humorously with a pleasing natural voice. His performance was raw, funny and profoundly sad. To this day when kids ask me what the sixties were like, I tell them to listen to Phil Ochs — it’s all there.

His tragic life was just as iconic. He traveled the world. In Tanzania he was mugged and his attacker hit him in the throat with a club. His voice was never the same. That set off a downward spiral. He bummed around the country for years under assumed names. In Dave Van Ronk’s deathbed autobiography, partially ghost written by his wife and a close friend, Phil is described near the end, sitting on Dave’s couch maniacally cutting pictures out of magazines and threatening anyone who came near with scissors. Then he hung himself. Sean Penn is a big fan. I read that when he was still young enough he wanted to play Phil in his life story, but that film never happened. Too bad, he would have been good.

       

As for the UFO Coffee House, the authorities trumped up charges and closed it down. They charged the owners with owning and maintaining a public nuisance. I sat through the Stalinesque show trial. I remember that the main complaint was that the UFO “was a gathering place for persons of evil name, fame, and conversation.” When I heard that I started to raise my hand, the coed with me grabbed my arm and shook her head no. Probably a good thing, even if my bravado was at least partly due to us being buried deep in the balcony. The complaint also accused them of corrupting minors with their leftist propaganda, minors as defined by the prosecutor as anyone under twenty-one. Now at that time the drinking age in South Carolina was eighteen for beer and wine. So going into a bar and getting knee-walking bowl-hanging drunk was just fine, but reading the latest issue of The Great Speckled Bird was corrupting.

That trial convinced me that God really was goofing on me. I had long suspected it. In the considerable history of that law, the harshest penalty ever given out had been a thirty day suspended sentence. From day one the verdict was never in doubt. Three people were sentenced to six years each. At least one guy had jumped bail earlier and fled home to New York. Governor Rockefeller refused to extradite. The appeals took about a year winding their way through the state court system, losing at every turn. When the case reached the state supreme court the next stop would have been the federal courts. There was no doubt that the convictions would have been overturned there, probably accompanied by some scathing language. So to avoid the embarrassment, the state supreme court overturned the convictions on a technicality. Such were the sixties.