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Bush and Morgan on inner city baseball

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President Bush is a big baseball fan and in fact was a previous owner of the Texas Rangers. In tonight’s MLB opener in the new ballbark in Washington DC, Bush threw out the first pitch and then spent a couple of innings in the broadcast booth with Joe Morgan and Jon Miller.

I’m not a big Morgan fan—he has a habit of stating the obvious and saying the most inane things during a broadcast—but a few years ago he wrote an article on trying to get inner city youth involved in baseball that I enjoyed and found myself agreeing with.

Morgan and others see the problem is not that baseball fails to find black players, but that the black athletes from the inner city and elsewhere are failing to choose baseball. While only 6% of top college teams are made up of blacks, half of the players on those same college basketball teams are black.

Tonight, the President brought up the issue. Many inner city youth see sports as a way out of the inner city and basketball is the sport of choice. Yet it is harder to become a pro basketball player. As Bush pointed out, baseball drafts more players, has larger contracts, and players have longer careers than any other sport. Even if you don’t make the 25 man roster on one of the 30 MLB teams, baseball has a rich farm system with AAA teams for each Major team as well as numerous AA and A teams, often more than one of each for each MLB team. You’re not going to make much of a livable salary until you reach the AAA level, but most players get some sort of signing bonus, often a large one.

Joe Morgan suggested that baseball should hold clinics in the inner city like the NBA does.

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