WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JACKIE ROBINSON?

Seven decades later, few Black Americans play baseball. The league doesn't seem to care.

Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic...America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere-belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. -WALT WHITMAN

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A FIFTHgrade boy whose sixth-grade friend, in the absence of the boy's father, marched him to the local community center and signed him up for a youth basketball team. Just a few months later, the same sixth-grade homie marched that fifth-grader over to a local park and signed him up for a Little League baseball team. That fifth grader was me. The sixth grader was the homie Stevie.

From then until I graduated from Portland Community College, I played on an organized basketball team. (All-league, too.) But beyond that one season, I never again played organized baseball.

For one thing, it felt like baseball never needed me, to say nothing of wanting my presence. For two, I couldn't practice it alone the way I could basketball. Not to mention, the truth that I never saw baseball players as aspirational-that far as I could tell, they failed to transcend their game, or even their teams, to become stars in the culture. Sure, there was Rickey Henderson, and Darryl Strawberry, and Dwight Gooden, but none of them celebrated their feats with the panache of "Neon" Deion Sanders in the end zone or Air Jordan at mid-court; neither they nor any other baseball player reached the cultural coolness of Magic Johnson. Go ahead-name a kid who ever begged his parents for baseball-player-shilled kicks to wear to school.

It was and remains-as if baseball strove to make its players automatons, on and off the field. Say what you will about Dennis Rodman, but dude was nobody's snooze.