Hank Aaron should focus energy on restoring Black Americans to baseball

Last week on the 40th anniversary of his record breaking 715th home run, in a disappointing, sad and silly statement legendary Hall of Fame slugger Henry Aaron compared congressional Republicans who oppose President Obama to the Klu Klux Klan. 

Indirectly, Aaron inferred that whites among the nearly 61 million Mitt Romney voters sympathize with the Klan which has a long history of lynching blacks as well as burning down and bombing churches even when they had young children praying inside.

Aaron’s correct that most white Republicans in Congress, all wearing as he noted “neckties and starched shirts” instead of “hoods,” oppose President Obama. They disagree with his multiple Affordable Care Act changes, estimated at about 20 since March 2010 when the bill was signed. And many in the House are shocked that President Obama has rewritten immigration policy wherein, even though only Congress can change the laws, deportable aliens have been granted prosecutorial discretion that allows them to stay.  Those who received a “pardon in place” include 68,000 convicted criminals recently released from jail.

Born in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron grew up picking cotton. Throughout his early career and during his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record, Aaron heard hateful taunts and received death threatening letters, which he kept to remind him of racial intolerance. Aaron lives near Atlanta where racism, at least in some corners, still prevails.

But Aaron’s sweeping statement that indict whites who exercise their First Amendment rights to reasonably take issue Obama’s unilateral Executive Branch actions doesn’t advance his objective to improve African-Americans lives and to spare them from the racism he endured. 

If Aaron wants to do something constructive, he should fight against how MLB owners have systematically displaced black players. During the mid-1980s, African-Americans comprised about 20 percent of the teams’ rosters. Today, the total stands at 8 percent. Owners have engaged in widespread, hypocritical hand wringing about how to restore black youths’ interest in baseball. 

But baseball has plenty of black players, mostly from the Dominican Republic. More than 26 percent of the Opening Day roster players were foreign- born with Dominicans and Venezuelans making up the majority. 

Casual fans may think American players’ decline and the corresponding foreign-born players’ ascent is the result of globalism, improved scouting and the deeper talent pool among players who live in year around warm weather climates. That’s partially true. 

But a much bigger culprit is the P visa, a rarely reported, under the radar vehicle that allows owners to pass over American prospects and block them from the world’s best job where the minimum salary is $500,000 and the average salary $3.5 million. The best players earn more than $25 million annually.

In 2006, during former MLB owner George W. Bush's second term, Congress passed the Compete Act that lets teams sign and bring to the U.S. an unlimited number of worldwide players. Not surprisingly, poor, desperate Dominican players are willing and eager to sign for bonuses half or less than their American counterparts receive. Not only is $25,000, for example, more money than they could imagine, the prospect of coming to the U.S. legally and becoming a permanent resident is also a lure. 

Think cheap labor. Owners stock their teams with players while paying them less than the prevailing American rate. Since foreign-born players’ abilities are indistinguishable to the average fan from an outstanding College World Series star, owners risk nothing.

The easily obtained P visa expands the labor pool, and has no cap, a bad deal for American prospects. Playing baseball is job American kids yearn for. Aaron, still a respected baseball voice despite his ill-advised remarks, should focus his anger where it will help African-Americans--- on capping the P visa which would help blacks return to the National Pastime.

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     Joe Guzzardi is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com