In the nearly three decades since Major League Baseball has turned April 15 into a de facto industry holiday, there have been years in which celebrating Jackie Robinson has felt downright paradoxical.
You could say 2025 qualifies.
The game is right to celebrate its most impactful participant, an American civil rights hero whose courage in breaking baseball’s color line at its highest level should always be taught even if his example and his message are subject, like Martin Luther King, to bad faith actors co-opting and twisting it beyond recognition.
Within baseball, it has been a complex dynamic. Noble gestures such as retiring his No. 42 throughout MLB and all players donning it each April 15 are juxtaposed against backsliding Black representation in the big league player population and inconsistent organizational commitments to front office diversity.
The events of the past month-plus, when MLB scrubbed references to “diversity” from its careers home page, and the Department of Defense deleted references to Robinson’s military service before restoring it under pressure, and Robinson’s Dodgers franchise uncritically visited the president who made all of the above possible, create an unsettling reality that resonates even more on Jackie Robinson Day.
We simply can’t count on our institutions to save us.
The voters of this country have opted for what they believe to be rugged individualism, so long as it doesn’t hit home too hard for them. The man they elected to lead them wants us to believe the proverbial playing field has long been leveled for everyone, even as his family’s legacy was built on virulent discrimination.
And even as his hand-picked choices for crucial leadership positions err in a manner that suggests fealty and cronyism and not qualifications drove their hiring, private entities have felt compelled to fall in line.
Yet this is where MLB can do better than Target, which loudly ditched DEI and is now paying the price for it, and other corporations who once touted diversity wins yet are deserting hiring practices that enhance the chances their company reflects the people it aims to serve.
In short: MLB needs to keep it pushing.
The league has come relatively far since 1987, when Dodgers GM Al Campanis found he couldn’t use his late friend Robinson as a human shield when he claimed Blacks lacked the “necessities” to lead a front office or manage a ballclub.
The question posed by Ted Koppel that led to Campanis’s downfall simply asked why there were no Black GMs, managers or owners in the game.
In the years since, Black managers Cito Gaston, Dave Roberts and Dusty Baker have won World Series championships, as have Latino skippers Alex Cora, Dave Martinez and Ozzie Guillen. Ken Williams constructed the White Sox team that, with Guillen, ended an 88-year championship drought.
Yet today’s landscape reveals just one Black GM, Dana Brown, and three managers – Roberts, the White Sox’s Will Venable and the Angels’ Ron Washington.
The future offers mixed signals. Black player participation peaked, according to various estimates sometime in the late 1970s and early ‘80s; Washington, now 72, might represent the last of that group of former players in the managerial ranks.
There are nine Black assistant GMs, along with five Latino AGMs and four of Middle Eastern, Indian American or Asian descent. Almost all are what one might consider “baseball lifers,” entering the industry at the ground level and working their way closer to the executive suite, even if some have specific concentrations in international scouting or finance, say.
And none were products of MLB’s Diversity Pipeline Program, which those obsessed with purging the “D-word” from society might find surprising.
That fact proves a couple of interesting points. One, that diverse execs in baseball not only got there on merit but almost certainly did, in fact, have to grind harder than their counterparts.
And two, that inclusion efforts take time.
It’s been a decade since MLB initiated the Diversity Pipeline Program, which came at a time when franchise obsession with Ivy League analytics robots was arguably at its peak and front offices took on a largely monochromatic sheen. The diversity program has produced more than 400 hires within organizations.
Even as front offices aim to outflank their rivals, upward mobility remains challenging. Yet it seems inevitable program grads will eventually crack the c-suite, even if nepotism and cronyism will always provide obstacles.
Nurturing Black prospects on the field is similarly challenging. The league operates nine youth academies in urban areas and touts its myriad baseball development programs. Yet the former feels like a Band-Aid in an era when the cost of entry to the sport only gets higher, while the latter groups together players who have already demonstrated proficiency in the game.
Still, they are important efforts, if only to gather dozens of kids who likely are the only Black players on their own teams back home and introduce them to peers going through similar experiences. Many of those bonds will likely last well into adulthood.
Meanwhile, relief could come in the Wild West of amateur ball. Name, Image and Likeness opportunities have changed the calculus for athletes aiming to continue their careers collegiately. Onerous NCAA scholarship limits often served to push away the athlete who could not afford cost of attendance at a baseball power if they received, say, a one-quarter share of a scholarship.
While MLB’s truncated 20-round draft and smaller minor league system might narrow the talent pool, NIL may very well keep the young athlete playing baseball – especially if it pays more to be the leadoff man than the second-string quarterback.
It is a complex ecosystem, all of it under fire from a grievance-addled culture that despite its occasional platitudes fails to recognize the Sisyphean efforts to get in – and stay in – the game in the decades since Robinson broke the game’s color barrier.
Scrubbing language from a web site might enable the legal department to sleep better at night, but that’s just part of the equation. It’s incumbent on MLB to cheerfully refuse compromising what it might call its “values,” to be a Harvard and not a Columbia, to put it in terms the modern franchise can appreciate.
Paying homage to Robinson is always the right thing. Heeding his words is even better, such as when he wrote to President Eisenhower in 1958 after Ike urged “patience” in the battle for civil rights:
“Seventeen million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans. This we cannot do unless we pursue aggressively goals which all other Americans achieved over 150 years ago.”
It is clear certain hearts will never change. In 2027, MLB will mark the 80th anniversary of Robinson boldly erasing much of its exclusionary shame. The celebration will resonate a little more if, in the interim, the industry does not further squander the gains made over decades of starts and stops.
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