On the most recent episode of HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, Chris Rock talked about the loneliness of being a black baseball fan in 2015, at a time when fewer than 10 percent of baseball's players and fans are black.
"Last year, the San Francisco Giants won it all without any black guys on the team," said Rock. "The team the Giants had to beat to get there, the St. Louis Cardinals, had no black people. None. How could you ever be in St. Louis and see no black people? And get this. Their crowds were more than 90 percent white — like the Ferguson police department!"
Rock joked that even several historically black colleges with nearly all-black student bodies, like Stillman College in Alabama, field nearly all-white baseball teams.
You can watch the whole segment below.
WARNING: This is Chris Rock, and he's on HBO. As you might expect, there's some salty language here.
Rock jokes that baseball's fetishization of the "good ol' days" doesn't really play with black folks, who are understandably less inclined to reminisce about the halcyon days of American life in the 19th century. But he says that black disinterest in baseball is a threat to the sport's long-term health — financially, baseball is doing well at the moment, but all the demographic trend lines point to a rough road ahead. As I wrote not too long ago, baseball's TV fan base skews older and whiter every year, and there are ever fewer young fans or players — of color or otherwise — rushing in to replace them.
"I don't care about any of this as a black guy — I care about this as a baseball fan," Rock says. "Blacks don't seem to care, but baseball should be terrified."
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