The Case of The Missing Black Man

The sports media had one of its fake-outrage displays after Torii Hunter, centerfielder for the Angels, said, "People see dark faces (on the field), and the perception is that they're African-American.  They're not us. They're imposters."

The media milked his impolitic choice of words for one news cycle, then realized they could get another story out of it by actually taking his quote seriously.  What Hunter was referring to is the fact that today, only about 9% of MLB players are African-American, while 28% are foreign-born.  In the context of other sports, this seems outrageously low, because 80% of NBA players and 70% of NFL players are black, and many media outlets are portraying this disparity as some sort of injustice.

But in the context of society as a whole, the numbers are justifiable:  of American-born MLB players 12.5% are black;  in America as a whole, among people aged 20-39, about 13.5%  are black.

 Data from 2000 Census

That's a pretty minor discrepancy, so why is the sports media complaining?  Probably because they're making the racist assumption that blacks are superior at sports, and should be overrepresented in all sports.  I won't impugn that assumption because I sort of share it myself, but lets play pretend and assume they merely want to have a proportional representation, to bring that 12.5% in line with the expected 13.5%.

The thing is, that 13.5% represents both genders, if you narrow it down to just males aged 20-39, only 12.8% are black - this number is lower because so many black men die young. You can see in this chart that for all races, males in their 20s and 30s tend to die off quicker than females, but in blacks, the effect is very pronounced.  In their late teens, black males outnumber black females roughly 50.5-49.5, but by their late 30s, so many men have died that its 47.0-53.0.

Data from 2000 Census

According to the following chart, black men have about a 3.1% chance of dying between the age of 15 and 29, whereas white men have about a 1.6% chance.

From the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Much of this discrepancy is attributable to homicide, according to the Heritage Foundation, during the 1990s, "the probability of being murdered by age 45 is 2.21 percent nationally for all U.S. black males and 0.29 percent for all white males."

Then, when you consider the disproportionate incarceration rates of young black men, the potential pool of black MLB players gets even smaller, with only 12.0% of unincarcerated males aged 20-39 being black, and that only removes those in prison, not jail.

Incarceration statistics for state and federal prisons in 2001, doesn't include jail. - jrank.org

In fact, 12.6% of young black men (age 25-29) are in prison or jail, making them 7.5 times more likely than whites to be incarcerated.

Statistics for prison and jail inmates, mid-2004 - prisonpolicy.org

Of what should be a potential talent pool of about 5,675,000 African-American men, roughly 414,000 have died prematurely as a symptom of being black, about 328,000 are in prison, and roughly another 300,000 are in jail.  These figures more than account for the shortage of blacks in baseball, but that's not a sports story, so instead the media flies into a fake-outrage about the lack of baseball camps for urban youth.   Its a good thing the national past-time is such a great diversion:  imagine how outraged these writers would be if they were covering a real story.