Beyond Baseball’s Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future

Sports historian Constantino (50 Moments That Defined Major League Baseball) takes a detailed if sometimes superficial look at the impact of African Americans on the history of professional baseball. Pulling from mostly secondary sources, Constantino begins his narrative in 1884 with Moses Fleetwood Walker, who was considered “the last Negro to play in the majors” before Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Constantino’s coverage of the rise of Black players in the sport after Robinson took the field is solid but unremarkable—favoring laundry lists of dry stats and records set over in-depth stories—and fails to touch on wider issues of racism within baseball. Casual followers of the game may be surprised at the recent decline in the percentage of Black players in Major League Baseball, going from 18.5% in 1975 to below 10% in the last decade. Constantino delineates the theories around this significant drop—which include a rise in the number of Hispanic players—but doesn’t analyze it in depth, or suggest how the trend could be (or if it will be) reversed. This works as a decent primer, but those with even basic familiarity with the history of the sport won’t be blown away. (May)