Rickwood sans Willie

It's missing something. A couple of somethings, to be honest.

Without Willie Mays, there are just two living alumni of the iteration of the Negro Leagues that lasted from 1920 to 1948. The Giants will play tonight to honor the players who were forced into a segregated league, but the greatest of them passed away Tuesday at 93, surrounded by family, after having lived a long, great life. And while tonight’s game is certainly going to feature lots of Negro Leagues history and be a great tribute to all the men who played there, it will be emptier without Mays, who always kind of felt like the linchpin of the whole thing.

“This was the home stadium of Willie Mays,” the hype machine kept telling us about Rickwood Field in Birmingham, over and over. Willie Mays! If any baseball player could ever inspire that kind of reverence, it was Mays, and it was well deserved, so MLB made this event about him. They painted a Willie Mays mural and brought his Hall of Fame plaque from Cooperstown in order to make it a Willie Mays Experience.

But Mays is gone now, and so you can still honor him, and pay tribute to the greatest athlete and ambassador the the game has ever seen, but you also have to pivot a bit. Because this is meant to be an event that ties together the past, the present, and the future, its meaning is tied up not only with Mays, but in the progress we’ve made since his time, and the state of the game today.

And, uh, whoops.

As of Opening Day, just 5.7% of the league was African-American, which was the lowest mark since 1955 (In 2023, that number was 6.2%, from 2020-2022 it was over 7%, and in 2019 it was 8.4%, to give a comparison with recent history). As of Opening Day, 5 teams had zero African-American players and another 10 had exactly one. African-American participation in Major League Baseball, then, is historically low, and here everyone is in Alabama to honor the legacy of Black Americans who played baseball and wanted to play baseball, instead of the present day, when we’re seeing less of that than ever.

To its credit, Major League Baseball is trying to address the issue. Its RBI program — Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities — has been going for 35 years now. But on the other hand, it’s been running for 35 years, during which time this problem has only gotten worse. They are providing equipment and instruction and even scholarships, and all of that is great, but in a competition with kids whose parents have enough money to put them on travel teams all year, the RBI kids are mostly going to lose.

To be clear: it is great that this game is honoring Willie Mays and it is great that this game is honoring the rich history of the Negro Leagues. The game will feature an all-Black umpiring crew, which is fantastic, doubly so because CB Bucknor will not be calling balls and strikes. There will doubtless be testimonials from the many, many baseball stars on hand about the importance of this game and the personal and professional greatness of Willie Mays.

There will, however, not be a lot of Black players actually in the game.

It’s possible that the Cardinals will use their 27th man call-up on Jordan Walker or Victor Scott II, two Black players who started the season on their Opening Day roster before being demoted to AAA. The Cardinals will certainly start Masyn Winn at shortstop. The Giants\ will not pitch Jordan Hicks, who starts on Saturday, or (presumably) Spencer Bivens, who threw 2 innings yesterday.

Of course, the Giants would have had LaMonte Wade Jr in the game if not for his injury, and he is well enough to swing a bat, if not field or run full speed. They even appealed to the league to let him come off the IL for one game without affecting his IL status, so he can return fully ready to go, but their appeal was denied, and so Wade cannot return without resetting his Injured List eligibility, and so Wade will not return today.

The Giants will have Latin players appearing in the game — Jorge Soler and Thairo Estrada and Heliot Ramos — none of whom would likely be playing without baseball’s Black pioneers, but they will not have any African-Americans. It’s not a fitting tribute to Mays and the Black Barons, but it is, in its way, appropriate. This is the version of baseball that we have now, and to pretend otherwise would be a lie, and it would do a disservice to everyone fighting to make things better. This is the state of the game now, as sad as that is.

And so the Giants and Cardinals will take the field tonight, with one Black player on the field between the two teams combined, and play a game that honors the history of the Negro Leagues. This isn’t a complaint over any particular decision — even denying the Wade appeal was a sensible, normal move that just happens to stink of bad PR — but an observation. No one did anything wrong, and yet every year we’re getting farther and farther away from where we want to be. The words that people will say during the game about its ideals won’t match the actions taken on the field at the same time. That’s not a great tribute to Willie Mays, but when it comes to race, it is as American as it gets.