BRADENTON, Fla. — It has been 67 years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball and 40 years since Hank Aaron blasted his 715th home run to break the career record long held by Babe Ruth. But just 8.3 percent of players on opening day rosters in 2013 were African-American, according to the University of Central Florida Institute for Diversity in Sports (PDF), making many wonder about the league’s ability and interest in swinging for the fences on diversity in a country where 13.1 percent of the population is black. There was progress in the 1960s and ’70s at making the game more diverse — 26 percent of players on rosters were black in 1979, five years after Aaron’s record-breaking homer — but a slump since has seen the number drop to percentages about as low as they’ve been since baseball became fully integrated in 1959, and this weekend’s opening day rosters aren’t expected to look much different. “I think Jackie certainly would be disappointed in the way things are today, especially for African-Americans,” Aaron told USA Today last year. “Let’s face it, baseball was down, and when he came along, he put a big spike into baseball with the way he played, and along came other great black ballplayers.” Certainly, the 25-man rosters of the 30 major league teams are diverse in other ways. Players of Latin descent made up 28.2 of players on MLB rosters at the start of the 2013 season. But a sharper, ground level view of diversity in sports may explain the 8.3 percent. The baseball landscape has changed in America since the days of Robinson, particularly the landscape of the backyard and the sandlot. Onetime baseball towns such as Mobile, Ala., and Atlanta have become football towns. The sandlot is now for throwing around a football, and many kids of color would rather take their chances chasing the 85 scholarships offered per Division I college football program so they can get an education and the adoration of 85,000 fans rather than endure the inglorious bus rides of the minor leagues. But a more distressing view suggests baseball has priced out a significant portion of potential players. Baseball for youth is now $85-an-hour hitting and pitching lessons and elite travel teams where the best players flock to pursue dreams of college or professional ball. Those travel teams can cost parents $1,500 to $3,000 each summer.

Socioeconomics at play

Josh Bell, who is black, is a 21-year-old right fielder in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, a top draft pick working his way through the minor league ranks. He points to socioeconomics as an explanation for the relative lack of black players in baseball. “Think about the demographics of the black population as a whole and how poorly we are doing as a whole as a race,” Bell said. “It is a lot easier to go outside and run some drills with the football rather than paying for hitting lessons or pitching lessons and going to this showcase or that showcase. “Baseball is one of those sports that is really expensive, and the showcases are starting earlier and earlier. The competition is getting stiffer, so the need for some sort of training outside of the hitting tee in the backyard comes more and more at an earlier age.” More distressing than the economics is the uneven justice system in America, Bell said. An incarcerated father cannot very well play catch with his son. “There’s got to be so much time invested to play this game,” said Bell, whose mother is a professor at University of Texas at Arlington, focusing on diversity and social issues in the workplace. “It’s best if there’s some sort of father figure around. I want to say that one-fifth of black men are incarcerated and three-fifths of black women with children are single. So it’s like, without that father, without the initial love for the game, which starts in the backyard playing catch with the dad, it’s hard for you to catch that love of baseball.”

Josh Harrison, right, with teammate Jordy Mercer during a game in September. Jamie Sabau/Getty Images Certainly not all black youths are poor. Bell took the $85-an-hour hitting lessons. He played on the elite teams. And before the lessons and the travel teams, he played catch with his father, Earnest. Josh Harrison, an infielder for the Pirates who is black, was nurtured in baseball by his mother’s brother, former major leaguer John Shelby. Harrison also played on elite travel teams, which are typically the domain of white players. There are usually some built-in advantages for some kids to adopt the game, Harrison said, and Shelby was his. “Baseball isn’t taught there [in black communities] because there is nobody to really teach it,” Harrison said. “You have to have those people to reach out. When it’s not a good baseball program to be around in that community, parents aren’t going to waste their time sending their kid to do baseball. It’s just not made as big of a deal as basketball and football. It’s a matter of having somebody there who will do baseball.”

Leveling the field