The American Spectator

THERE MAY BE SIMPLE PHYSICAL reasons why basketball and football are more popular than baseball among blacks in America. You can play basketball one-on-one, or two-on-two, or in any combination up to full team strength (five). Football is so organized, it can be played (really) only in institutions of one kind of another.

By contrast, among boys, baseball is the gentlest, most sociable of pickup games. You have to choose up sides. That requires captains, by acclamation. If you have fewer than nine players to a side, you have to distribute positions equitably. You have to come up with local and per-game rules suitable to the occasion: Hitting a nearby building may be an automatic foul ball; “one base on an overthrow;” a batting order; medium-soft pitching so as to allow maximum hits (hard pitching being reserved for organized games at Little League and the like).

And somebody is going to get stuck in right field, where, in childhood baseball, nobody ever hits anything.

It does not allow for macho posturing, beating other people up, or, in the classic loser’s ploy, taking your ball and going home.

Yep. That’s a “pu**y game,” all right. It does not provide “the things my race demands.”

You can blame a lot of things: A soaring rate of illegitimacy among American blacks, broken homes, absent fathers, a diminishing influence of large, positive social institutions like churches and good schools — those latter two words being a nearly automatic oxymoron in today’s public education. You can blame video games, I-pods, television, advertising, and music.

WHATEVER DOES IT, IT’S PITIFUL. I pity black culture in America today. It is a long, long fall from Duke Ellington to Snoop Doggy Dog. In a shorter time, it is a long, long fall from Willie Mays to Barry Bonds — or Gary Sheffield. We are all much poorer for it.