Mark Anthony Neal, Baltimore Sun
- When the rosters for Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game were announced, only 10 black players, including the Orioles’ Adam Jones, were among the 64 picked for the American League and National League rosters. Among the 16 players chosen as starters by fan vote, only Derek Jeter of the Yankees is African-American.
The 1979 All-Star Game, by contrast, featured 16 African-American players, including seven starters and seven future Hall-of-Famers.
In 2009, a little more that 10 percent of all Major League Baseball players are black – the first increase in more than a decade but still a far cry from the close to 30 percent mark achieved in the mid-1970s. The diminishing presence of African-American players has reached such a point that many historically black colleges and universities explicitly recruit white and Latino players to field full-fledged teams.
