The American Spectator

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The Nation's Pulse

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When blacks began to show up on Major League rosters in the early 1950s, I was part of that throng of pre-teen boys who spent paper-route and lawn-mowing money on bubble- gum baseball cards. We keenly wanted to have cards picturing Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams and Stan Musial. But we also wanted to have the cards of Roy Campanella and Ernie Banks and a young Henry Aaron. In a world in which the races were effectively separated, Major League baseball players were about the first black Americans we paid attention to and took seriously.

My pals in post-war Tampa and I loved baseball. It took up more of the attention and psychic energy of young American males then than it has since, or likely ever will again. If any boy at my junior high school had any dream other than becoming a Major League baseball player, he kept it to himself. Thanks to our sandlot exertions, we knew even then how difficult baseball is to play well. How long it takes to acquire baseball skills. So we admired those who could play our game at the very highest level, whether that person was named Mantle or Aaron, Williams or Doby. It was the first step in the right direction for many of us.

But the times have changed. There are more sports, and more diversions, to take up the time and energy of Americans, black or otherwise. And baseball, which has many subtleties and requires a real attention span to fully appreciate, may be a bit out of step with the hyperkinetic, quick-cut, thrill-a-second, information-overload age we live in.

Many black youngsters consider that basketball and football have more flash and dash than baseball, and are the cool sports to be involved in. (It's cool to wear expensive basketball sneakers to class -- try wearing a pair of baseball cleats and see what happens to you.) While I see baseball as a luxuriously paced work of art, endlessly fascinating and full delights and surprises, lots of young Americans consider baseball to be too slow. Downright boring. This is the nub of Solomon's and MLB's challenge.

But baseball has been counted out before. There have been articles for decades about how baseball was losing popularity, especially to football. Baseball's demographics, we've been told, trend older than other sports. So where will the new baseball fans come from?

I'm not sure where they came from. But when I was in Fenway for a game last month, there was a focused, raucous baseball fan in every seat. They were there for the first pitch, and whooped and yelled or groaned on every pitch for the entire nine. No one left before the game was over. No one was bored. Similar experiences are going on at less febrile baseball venues than Fenway.

If Jimmy Lee Solomon can help keep this kind of enthusiasm going, then there will be enough baseball left, as the Brits say, to see me out. And baseball for the next generation as well. If this happens, Solomon and his colleagues will have my thanks. But it would be nice if we could get back to talking about the game, rather than about the color of the guys in uniform playing it.

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