Black baseball players made up about 20% of Major League Baseball in the 1970s. Today, they're less than 8%.

He quickly became the face of the St. Louis Cardinals, following Stan Musial’s retirement in 1963. ... The post The Top Black Major League Baseball Players Of All Time appeared first on Blavity.

As Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day the current percentage of its rosters that features Black players creeps closer to the same figure when Jackie broke baseball’s color ...

MLB players themselves have noticed. “There aren’t as many African American kids playing the game that I would like to see,” Curtis Granderson, a three-time Major League Baseball All-Star ...

Dario Otero Jr., affectionately known as DJ, admires Jackie Robinson for making history as the first Black American to play Major League Baseball. DJ, 13, said Robinson proved that Black players ...

By 1974, the 25-year-old Baker was part of a new generation of Black ballplayers, who had come to dominate the league. In fact, in the 1970s, Black baseball players made up close to 20% of all ...

And with declining participation — from 18% in 1976 down to 7.8% in 2020 — of African Americans in the game, there's never been a better time for a new Black icon in baseball.

TONY REAGINS: I don't look at it now as 6 or 7% of Black players at the major league level. SUMMERS: Tony Reagins was hired by MLB in 2015 to tackle this very issue.

Baseball’s owners cut the draft from 50 rounds to 40 rounds in 2012, then to 20 rounds last year. They also eliminated 43 minor league teams, and with them about 1,000 players.

The league also adopted a new yearly tradition, “Jackie Robinson Day,” on which all players of all teams wear No. 42 to honor him. Robinson also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ...

As Robinson warned and Aaron feared, Black participation in Major League Baseball declined from 24 percent to 18.2 percent (144 to 109 players) between 1973 and 1976.