Friday is the 75th anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in Brooklyn, and the day that Major League Baseball honors his memory league-wide.

But if Jackie were still with us, can you imagine what he’d be saying about the current state of Black participation in baseball? It almost certainly wouldn’t be complimentary.

From the late ’50s through the mid-1980s, integration transformed this sport and made it more compelling and exciting. The first great generation of Black superstars triggered interest and desire among the kids who looked like them. (And since most of the great Black players were signed by National League teams early on, that league won 24 of 26 All-Star Games through 1982.)

But from 1986, when a demographic survey by members of the Society for American Baseball Research put the percentage of American Black players at an all-time high of 18.3%, it has dropped to the 6-to-7% range. In 2021, Black players represented 7% of the total, while Latino players were nearly 30%.

A look at the 30 active rosters before Thursday night’s games revealed just 5.59% Black players, compared to 25.7% Latino. Add a dozen players currently on injured lists and the percentage of Black players jumps to a shade over 7%.

It’s no secret that football and basketball are considered cooler and have a far larger space in pop culture. But Houston manager Dusty Baker said last week in Anaheim that the first way to reverse the trend would be to “have more kids that guys can look at on TV to relate to. That’s number one. I mean, when I was a kid, we all wanted to be Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson, and Larry Doby and some of the greats that played before me.”

But it’s a little more complicated, as he acknowledged. The travel ball and showcase culture has helped make baseball a more expensive proposition. And while the path to the NFL or NBA is a college scholarship, nobody in college baseball gets a full ride, not when Division I coaches have to divide a maximum of 11.7 scholarships among a full roster.

“My son (Darren, now in the Washington Nationals’ farm system) just graduated (from Cal) and he had like a 50% or 60% scholarship, which is pretty good,” Baker said. “But you go to a school that costs $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 a year, well, somebody has to supplement that even if you get half.”

And after that, even a first-round MLB draft choice can have his head turned by the NFL. Exhibit A: Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray, who was the ninth pick of the 2018 baseball draft by the Oakland A’s, went back to Oklahoma, won the Heisman Trophy and was the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. Goodbye, baseball.

But there’s hope that those participation numbers can be improved.

The late John Young, a Texas Rangers scout, launched the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program in South L.A. in 1989 as he saw participation among Black kids shrinking in an area that had produced more than its share of big leaguers. That seed of an idea was the inspiration for an MLB-fueled initiative of youth baseball and softball academies in eight cities, with plans to open three more.

The first MLB Urban Academy opened in Compton in 2006. It is now known as the MLB Youth Academy, and it has sibling academies in Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Washington, D.C. Next up: Chicago, San Francisco and New York.

Hunter Greene, the former Notre Dame (Sherman Oaks) star who will pitch for the Cincinnati Reds at Dodger Stadium on Saturday night, is an alumnus. So are the New York Mets’ Dominic Smith. Cleveland pitcher Anthony Gose, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Ke’Bryan Hayes, Seattle shortstop J.P. Crawford and Baltimore pitcher Dillon Tate, among others.

It does take time for those seeds to bear fruit.

“Between 2012 and 2021, in the first round of the major league draft we had 56 African-American players out of the 320 or so selected,” said former Angels player, scout and executive Darrell Miller, who runs the Compton academy and is an MLB vice president for Youth and Facility Development. “That’s 17-18%. To get to the big leagues, from America, draft status is really important.

“We don’t discriminate. You can be any color. We just want you to get to the next level. … You’re starting to see some guys in impact positions that are going to be on TV a lot. When you’re at an impact position, that means you’re going to make a difference.”

If you see it, you can be it, right?

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The youth initiative was bolstered last year when MLB announced a partnership with the Players Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed by more than 150 current and former Black major leaguers. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced a $150 million donation to the Alliance for the specific purpose of bolstering Black participation in the game.

“Guys that used to play the game at the highest level, they have these travel ball groups and they’re developing kids and giving lessons and they’re active in their communities,” Miller said.

“These former players like myself can now go out and really make an impact, and I think that’s going to be the catalyst. We’re going to look back in 10 years at what we committed to, and that’s going to make a huge difference because those guys that I played with and played against, guys that came behind me, they’re out there trying to develop (players). I think it’s going to give them a lot more support to help get these kids to the next level.”

So maybe in a few years, the sport that hands every player a No. 42 jersey on April 15 can honor Robinson’s memory in a better way, with more players in those jerseys who truly represent what Jackie accomplished 75 years ago.

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