Comedian and actor Chris Rock became the latest person to point out baseball’s decline in interest among African-Americans.
In 2014, just 8.3 percent of Major League Baseball players were African-American. The current World Series champion San Francisco Giants didn’t feature a single African-American player on its roster last season.
In a hilarious, yet poignant seven-minute monologue for the latest edition of HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” Rock explores why African-Americans have become a dying breed in baseball.
“Stillman (College) is one of the oldest black schools in America. Almost every kid there is black — except for these 36. The baseball team. There is one black kid, and 35 white guys,” Rock explained.
Although Stillman’s baseball roster does also feature a Hispanic player, junior E.J. Perry is the team’s only African-American player.
As Rock mentioned, the baseball team does not reflect the racial demographics of the student body. According to College Factual, a website that uses charts, graphs and statistics to rank the nation’s colleges, noted that Stillman — based in Alabama — is 90.9 percent black and only 6.4 percent white out of a little more than 1,000 students.
Rock further explained that Howard, which dropped the baseball program in 2002, kept women’s volleyball and lacrosse.
“Lacrosse was black enough for Howard, but not baseball,” Rock said.
