Echoes

Jackie Robinson's appearance in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 brought about the end of a lot of things, but not all of them had been ugly.

The segregation that had kept some of the nation's best ballplayers off the national major league stage was ugly. Some of the great Negro League baseball teams and the communities they built were perhaps less so. Either way, the altruism of the major league owners and managers willing to break the color barrier ended in large part when it came to compensating Negro League owners like they might other teams. The top players left and the fans' attention turned towards people who looked like them but who now wore the uniforms and played in the green cathedrals of the best of the best. The leagues and teams they left behind, about on a par overall with the top AAA clubs of the nation, couldn't sustain that as a business model and folded.

In some places, though, regional groups of ethnic-dominated teams either continued or rose up. The ESPN website has a great photo essay on the Community AllStar Baseball League, 12 teams of mostly African-Americans that play in South Carolina. As the old Negro Leagues teams folded, players who were either past their prime or who had never been quite good enough to make the major leagues, no matter how much better they were than everyone else, began organizing small-team tournaments in different regions. A little more organization brought about leagues, such as the Community AllStar.

Baseball needed to be integrated (as did the rest of the society and nation), and it probably had to be done by one strong and principled owner basically kicking the wall down with the aid of at least one strong and principled player. But if it could have been done with more of a plan and more of a vision of baseball's role in African-American communities, then there might be a whole lot more Community AllStar leagues around the country, and it's hard to see that as a bad thing.