Abstract
The under representation of African-Americans in baseball is evident in college athletics today. African-American athletes make up only 4.5% of all National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) baseball players and a diminishing percentage of Major League Baseball players. African-Americans have shown an ever decreasing presence in the college game as evident by both the number of African-American participants and spectators associated with college baseball. If the pattern continues, college baseball could be void of African-Americans in the near future. To study this social trend, a focus group was established to identify specific sociological issues which were perceived by the focus group to influence the under representation of African-Americans in collegiate baseball. The focus group consisted of 12, college age, African-American males who were either currently on a NCAA Division II baseball roster or who had played baseball in high school and were no longer playing in college. The focus group met once weekly for four weeks during the spring of 2006 to discuss the issue under the facilitation of the authors of this study. Additionally, information from the observation of 36 SEC baseball games during the 2006 season was used to document spectator, player and coach demographics. Furthermore, data from the “traditionally black” Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) were also collected during the 2006 season. The authors found that the Southeastern Conference (SEC) baseball fan attendance was less than 1% African-American and the player participation rate was 1.91 per team during the 2006 season. Additionally, none of the SEC head or assistant baseball coaches were African-American in 2006. The focus group determined several primary reasons for the decline in numbers were related to (1) lifestyle factors; (2) competition for the African-American athlete from other sports and social opportunities; and (3) the absence of African-American role models in baseball. Obviously analysis of the movement of African-Americans out of baseball and suggested corrective action should be forthcoming in future research.