‘You still have to be Jackie Robinson’: Why baseball is missing Black kids
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
When Crystal Garrett’s son, Miles, was recruited to play baseball at Vanderbilt University, it felt like a dream come true — the culmination of years of sacrifice, a family’s unwavering belief in the game and a son who loved it.
At Parkview High School, he helped lead the Georgia powerhouse to three state championships. He had the arm, the academics and the mental edge — all sharpened by years of intensive training and significant financial investment from his family.
But behind the wins was a much harder truth, his mother said.
Credit: Courtesy Crystal Garrett
“He was often one of only two Black kids on the team,” Crystal Garrett recalled. “He had to navigate microaggressions, cultural misperceptions and power dynamics that many of his peers never had to think about.”
Garrett, a television screenwriter, poured everything into her son’s development: private pitching coaches starting at age 9 and cross-country travel for tournaments, showcases and elite training.
“That’s one of the main reasons for the decline in Black players,” she said. “Travel ball is expensive. Specialized training is expensive. And in our community, most kids have to be elite just to get noticed.”
Garrett’s observations speak to a quiet truth behind one of baseball’s most visible problems: the steep, decades long decline in Black participation.
In 1981, nearly 19% of Major League Baseball players were African American. By 2023, that number had dropped to just 6.2%, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport — the lowest percentage since the study began in 1991.
This isn’t just a big-league issue. It’s systemic.
In Division I college baseball, only about 4% of players are Black. In elite youth travel circuits — where scholarships and draft picks are often earned — Black players are even rarer.
The game, once a staple of Black neighborhoods, is slipping away.
At Tuesday’s MLB All-Star Game, while Hispanic players will be well-represented showing baseball’s overall diversity, only three players — Aaron Judge, Byron Buxton and James Wood — are African American.
“I remember what baseball gave me,” said Atlanta’s C.J. Stewart, a former Chicago Cubs draft pick out of Westlake High School and the co-founder of the LEAD Center for Youth, a nonprofit baseball organization that has served over 5,500 Black boys in Atlanta. “And I won’t rest until it gives the same to every Black boy who dares to dream.”
Credit: Courtesy CJ Stewart
Baseball has become an expensive sport.
Top youth players now compete year-round, travel across states and work with private coaches. One estimate puts annual travel team costs at nearly $4,000 — and that doesn’t include equipment.
Garrett said that from the time her son started playing T-Ball at age 4 through high school, her family spent an estimated $25,000 annually on travel, fees and specialized training.
Credit: Courtesy Crystal Garrett
That price tag shuts out many Black families.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income for Black households in 2023 was $56,000 — about 63% of the $89,050 earned by white households.
Add in the reality that baseball takes longer to pay off — often with years in the minor leagues earning between $19,800 and $35,800 a year — and the economic argument for choosing football or basketball becomes clear.
That is why Stewart sees the issue as bigger than just talent.
“The problem isn’t interest — it’s access, attention and acknowledgment,” Stewart said. “Do Black kids still love and play baseball? The short answer is yes. But like the old saying goes: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Willie Slaton, founder of the South DeKalb Tribe baseball academy, sees the same roadblocks from a grassroots level, where early training often determines who gets to advance.
“The biggest gap is in training and development,” he said. “And that gap is mostly financial.”
Slaton, who played college baseball at Valdosta State and North Carolina A&T, has spent the past decade on the front lines of that gap with the South DeKalb Tribe. His Atlanta-based program trains Black athletes from ages 5 to 18, helping them land scholarships, develop skills and — maybe most important — believe they belong in a sport that’s often left them behind.
“For a young Black kid who wants to play this game and loves it, they often have to be twice as good — sometimes five times as good,” Slaton said. “And they still have to walk a fine line. Even in 2025, to make it, you still have to be Jackie Robinson.”
Slaton’s program has sent 42 players to college on baseball scholarships in just the last three years — many to historically Black colleges and universities like North Carolina A&T State University, Southern University and Jackson State University, and others to schools like Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri.
But even with that success, he knows the challenges ahead.
He says that while Black kids still enter the game in strong numbers at a young age, participation falls off sharply once more advanced training becomes essential for continued growth.
“Athleticism can only take you so far,” Slaton said. “You have to be taught how to throw a slider. You’re not born knowing how to throw a breaking ball — or hit one moving 90 mph. That kind of development takes time, small-group work and one-on-one coaching. And that costs money.”
Private baseball trainers can charge up to $100 an hour.
For many Black families, especially those with more than one child, that’s a barrier too high to climb.
“Their white counterparts often start receiving that specialized training at age 5 or 6,” Slaton said. “In our community, a kid usually has to show a lot of promise before getting that chance — and by then, it’s often during the teenage years. So we’re behind the eight ball from a development standpoint.”
It wasn’t always this way.
Before Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, baseball thrived in Black communities. The Negro leagues were incubators for cultural pride and economic independence.
From Satchel Paige to Josh Gibson, legends played on dirt diamonds while entire neighborhoods gathered to watch.
But as integration moved forward, Black-owned teams and leagues faded. Urban baseball fields gave way to concrete. Infrastructure collapsed.
Major League Baseball shifted its recruitment efforts overseas — particularly to Latin America, where countries like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Cuba offer a steady stream of talent.
Today, roughly 30% of MLB players are Latino, including stars like Ronald Acuña Jr., Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr. While the global reach of baseball expanded, the Black American pipeline withered.
“Racism is not just about people — it’s about power,” Stewart said. “And power is built on two things: relationships and resources. When we lose the infrastructure, we lose access to both.”
But there are signs of hope.
MLB and its partners have launched several initiatives — Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, the Hank Aaron Invitational, the Dream Series, MLB Youth Academies and the HBCU Swingman Classic — to reintroduce the game to Black communities. And it’s starting to show.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
In 2022, four of the first five MLB draft picks were Black — including Garrett’s former Vanderbilt teammate, Kumar Rocker, Peachtree Corners’ Druw Jones and Mays High School graduate Termarr Johnson.
They were all products of at least one MLB diversity program. In 2023, 10 of the first 50 picks were Black. And the Swingman Classic uses the MLB All-Star Game as a backdrop to showcase 50 of the best players coming out of Black colleges.
The Atlanta Braves committed $3 million to youth baseball and softball in Georgia and have launched fellowships to increase off-field diversity in front offices and media.
Slaton is still fighting for the game, not just for his sons — ages 3 and 1 — but for every kid who dreams of making it.
“We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have, just trying to give our kids an even playing field to play the game they love,” Slaton said. “If we get that work, we’re more than capable of playing this game with the best in the world.”
That is the story that Garrett is trying to tell.
Credit: Courtesy Crystal Garrett
Miles Garrett left Vanderbilt after injuring his arm and undergoing Tommy John surgery. He recently completed his final year of eligibility at Virginia Commonwealth University and is playing for the Trenton Thunder as an amateur in the Major League Draft League.
As she followed her son’s journey from T-ball to elite college baseball, Crystal Garrett was inspired to make a documentary about the pipeline that both nurtured and neglected him.
That film became “Black to the Bigs,” her sweeping personal exploration of the decades long decline of African Americans in Major League Baseball.
Credit: Courtesy Crystal Garrett
She interviewed more than 60 baseball professionals, including Ken Griffey Jr., Mookie Betts and Ron Washington, weaving her son’s story into a broader tapestry of love, loss and resistance on the diamond.
“This isn’t just about my son,” she said. “It’s about a generation of boys who love this game and deserve to be seen.”
On Monday night, hours before the MLB Home Run Derby was set to begin, Garrett had her eye on her computer for Day 2 of the MLB draft — hoping to hear Miles’ name.
But after 20 rounds and 600 picks, as the screen faded to black, Miles’ name was never called.
Editor’s note: This story was revised to remove the calculated difference in median income between Black and white households and to include the salaries of minor league baseball players.
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.
