Glory Road Meets Minaya’s Mets and the All-Black Lineup
On the one hand, the Texas Western Miners of 1965-66 are celebrated for being the first national championship team in college basketball to field an all-black starting lineup. On the other hand, the Mets of Omar Minaya, who have 15 Latino players on their 40-man roster, are questioned by some for what they perceive as unfairly overloading their roster with Spanish-speaking players. And then there are the 1971 Pirates—the subject of an upcoming book by yours truly—who continue to be overlooked despite fielding the first and only all-black lineup in major league history.
For me, it all comes down to the quality of players. If players on my team can play, I don’t pay much attention to who’s black, who’s white, and who’s from a foreign land. Now I might think about it during a quiet moment, after the game or after the season, but rarely during the heat of a game. I think it comes down to this: in an ideal world, if you can win, and win with a representative and balanced cross-section of white, black, and Latino players, then that’s the best possible scenario. It shows that a team’s management is color blind when it comes to finding the best players to comprise a team. It also serves as a way of proving to the racial naysayers that teams can win with fully integrated rosters, with players of differing ethnic backgrounds playing well on the field and meshing well off the field. It can be done, as evidenced by Texas Western, which defied the odds to win the college championship of 1966, and the Pirates, who also overcame predictions of gloom to win the World Series in 1971.
In this week’s “Fan Forum” question, I’ll pose several queries. Does it matter to you what the racial composition of your team happens to be? Should we, as I believe we should, celebrate championship teams that win with a large degree of ethnic diversity and balance, as a real-life lesson about how people of different races can come together and achieve a united goal? Or should we not pay attention to the breakdowns of these rosters for fear that it will only serve to make people more divisive when it comes to the issue of race? These aren’t easy questions. Think about them. Let me know your thoughts.
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I think it’s a sign we still have a long way to go when we start counting ethnics on a team and people start complaining there’s too many Latinos, or African-Americans, or whatever.
I think the Padres story is interesting in that it took from 1948 to 1971 for an all-black lineup to come about; that said, I don’t remember Sporting News or anyone else making much a deal about it like they did with the Texas basketball team, for example – or, for that matter, when Elston Howard and Pumpsie Green finally made the majors
It doesn’t matter to me, but I now wonder if it is starting to matter to the Oakland A’s. Last year, after the departure of Octavio Dotel, who counts as both Latino and black, for TJ surgery, and before the arrival of Jay Payton, the A’s had no black players, Arthur Rhodes having been dealt after he did not work out as the closer in 2004. Oakland Tribune sportwriter Monte Poole, who is black, pointed out the lack of black players in one of his columns. He said he had been around the A’s front office folks long enough to know that they were not anti-black, but that black players were not likely to fit the profile of what the A’s were looking for in their minor leaguers. He called the team “non-black” and called for more diversity.
Oakland is either a majority black town or close to it. There are some people who objected to Jerry Brown becoming mayor because he is white. These people feel Oakland should always have a black mayor because of the size of the city’s black population. (Of course, the San Francisco Bay Area, as a whole, is ethnically diverse).
Ever since I read that article, I have wondered if race has played a factor in some of the A’s subsequent acquisitions, viz. Jay Payton and Milton Bradley. (Not Frank Thomas because Big Hurt is a future Hall of Famer). They said they wanted Jay Payton two years before they actually got him. But now he seems to be fighting for a job, despite hitting a bunch of homers while with the A’s. They’ve gotten Milton Bradley, a well-known head case with injury problems. Why? (We know Bradley is race-conscious. He raised the race issue with Jeff Kent when they were both with the Dodgers last season).
Did race play a factor in those two acquisitions? I don’t know, and I don’t expect the A’s front office to say if it did. But now I wonder.