Today is Jackie Robinson Day in the major leagues, and every player is welcome to wear Robinson's retired No. 42 on his uniform.Baseball's tribute is bound to warm hearts today, but Robinson would likely be cold to what clubhouses have looked like in recent years.
In 1995, 19% of big-league players were African-American. But those numbers have come crashing down since.
As the Milwaukee Brewers filed into the clubhouse through double metal doors for a spring training game in Peoria, Ariz., last month, they found a locker and sat down.
Some rested, some grabbed food, others hit the training room.
But in one corner, four players huddled around the 3-inch screen of an iPhone and laughed about whatever they were seeing on the sleek contraption.
Mike Cameron, Tony Gwynn Jr., Bill Hall and Rickie Weeks were those players. Throw in Prince Fielder and, on most days during spring training, that quintet could be found somewhere around the middle of the team's clubhouse.
They would talk about hip-hop music, movies from the 1990s, their dream starting five in basketball and a list of corny slang words someone found from an "urban dictionary" on the Internet.Those kinds of things happen in every clubhouse and locker room from high school to the big leagues. But in Major League Baseball, it doesn't always look like it does with the Brewers.
On this, the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in professional baseball, not every team in the league can boast five African-Americans on the same major-league roster.
The Brewers, however, can do just that.Cameron, Fielder, Gwynn, Hall and Weeks are all African-Americans, and they are baseball professionals.
In today's society, that combination is becoming as rare as a day when those five aren't reveling in each other's company. Why? The reason is harsh, but real: Young African-Americans are not choosing baseball anymore.
"I don't think Jack would be real happy," said Hall, referencing Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947. "He and the other pioneers who gave us this opportunity to be playing right now, I don't think they'd be too happy about it."
Only 9% of players were African-American in 2004 and 2005, and in 2006 the number dipped to 8.4%. The numbers rose some last season, but two teams -- the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros -- had no African-Americans on their rosters.
Things aren't any better in the college game. Last season, less than 7% of all NCAA Division I baseball players were African-American, according to a recent story in the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Those statistics, which surprised people a few years ago but have become common knowledge by now, are why the Brewers are an oddity. Last season, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays had five African-American players. This season, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have six African-Americans, and besides the Brewers, five other teams have five on their 25-man rosters.
"Besides college, this is the first team I've been on that has had more than four," said Weeks, who played at Southern University, a historically black college. "I feel good about the situation because you don't see it a lot. It's been pretty rare to see more than two people on the field who are the same as me."
That won't be the case this season.
Weeks, Fielder, Hall and Cameron will be regular starters this season. And Gwynn, until a hamstring landed him on the disabled list last week, was a regular in center field while Cameron serves a 25-game suspension.
All of those players are homegrown talent, except for Cameron, and no older than 28. Cameron signed with the Brewers in January partly because of the clubhouse's make-up.
He nodded his head slowly and smiled as he was asked if the number of African-Americans on the team was a factor in his signing.
"First and foremost, I had a chance to come to a situation where the pieces are there, and we just have to put them together," Cameron, 35, said. "No. 2, at this particular point in my career, to be able to instill the values taught to me, to get a chance to share those with these young brothers who have one or two years in the big leagues, it's pretty cool."
Cameron got his big-league call-up in 1995, and since then he has played on teams with lots of African-American talent, particularly in Cincinnati in 1999 when the team had eight players. Greg Vaughn mentored Cameron then, even allowing Cameron to live with him during spring training.
Cameron, who has been active in inner-city charities for years, also has two boys -- Dazmon, 11, and Mekhi, 6. This spring, they would occasionally dress in full uniform at their father's locker. They'd play catch and take fly balls, and during drills they'd stand to the side and study. Dazmon even left camp for a time to fly back to Georgia for a baseball tournament.
Dazmon and Mekhi Cameron know baseball; they were born into it and have always been around the game. Cameron believes that is why they gravitate toward the diamond, just as Fielder and Gwynn did as children of major-league players.
But Cameron's sons are exceptions today.
The reason the numbers of college and professional African American players are shrinking is because the kids are drawn to other sports and, in some cases, are never introduced to baseball.
Basketball and football's popularity are the main culprits, as well as dimming media exposure and cost, among a host of other societal reasons.
There is a misconception that those other sports lend themselves to the natural athlete, while baseball requires less athletic ability than basketball or football. It is also seen as boring or slow.
Of course, players take exception to that.
"You have less than eight tenths of a second to decide if you want to swing," Hall said. "I think that's pretty fast."
Still, Fielder can see why kids would gravitate to other sports.
"I wouldn't watch baseball either if I didn't play," he said. "If you've never actually played baseball, it's probably hard to get into it. You can go out and play pick-up basketball because it's easier. You can't do that with baseball."
The lack of media attention individual players attract is another deterrent. For every baseball player in a commercial, there are five or more basketball and football stars with their faces plastered on the screen. And you see them year around, while baseball players, with the exception of Derek Jeter, are rarely in a commercial outside of the season.
But that was not always the case. "When I was growing up, Ken Griffey Jr. was always on TV," Gwynn said. "You have a little bit now with Ryan Howard, but your basketball stars are on TV all the time.
"You have to reach the community by showing them another African-American is playing the sport. I mean, I don't know if people really recognize Derek Jeter as black. He is (universal)."
Cost has also played a role in the decline of inner-city African-Americans playing the game. Basketball requires little equipment, and football gear -- pads, helmets, uniforms -- can be reused and is often given out after a one-time fee. That is becoming less and less true with baseball, especially if you have talent and want to play beyond a three-month summer.
So as baseball expenses go up, the number of inner-city African-American players goes down.
"They're making it so that if you don't have money, you can't play," Hall said. "If you want to play on good teams with good coaches, it's a lot. And (inner-city) families don't have $1,000 to just give away for that."
Baseball also doesn't lend itself to instant gratification. Even if drafted in the first round, players usually toil in the minors for a least a few years, and some may never see the illuminating lights of "The Show."
And the hope for college is usually dashed when kids realize they might not even get a four-figure scholarship while some schools are cutting back or cutting out the sport from their athletic departments.
"I really do think that's a problem," Weeks said. "These kids look for the quick fix, meaning football and basketball, and those sports are just throwing away scholarships.
"In baseball, you have to toil for a while. It's a thinking man's game, and it takes a while to accumulate experience and maturity."
Hall, Weeks and Gwynn have held camps for inner-city kids and Hall is even planning to start a charity geared toward exposing African-Americans to the sport. In December, Hall and Weeks took 15 players from the Beckum-Stapleton Little League on a day-long trip to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Each player said they learned as much as the kids and plan to continue exposing inner-city children to the game and its players, including themselves.
"Obviously, once we make it, we don't live in urban communities anymore," Hall said. "So they don't get to see us, but they need to understand we listen to rap music, too; we like Jay-Z and Tupac and everybody else. "We're just like them."
If kids knew that, they might be more comfortable with the game, Hall added. And even though they are adults, the African-Americans on the Brewers roster covet the comfort of being around people like themselves.
"You're going to go where you're comfortable," Cameron said. "Me and (Gwynn) Jr. talk about things maybe only we understand, and I think that's important to have."
While Cameron, Fielder, Hall, Gwynn and Weeks could often be seen together in the clubhouse and in the dugout this spring, the white and Latino players get along with them, and each other, just as well. During spring training, Ryan Braun and J.J. Hardy had ping-pong tournaments with Venezuelan minor-leaguers Hernan Iribarren and Alcides Escobar, and Cameron sometimes yelled across the clubhouse in Spanish to his Latin teammates.
But with the opportunities becoming scarce, the African-American players are savoring this experience.
"We all get along, black, white, Spanish," Gwynn said. "It's not cliquey at all.
"But it is human nature to gravitate toward people you know, people you're familiar with. With the game being predominately white and Spanish, it's rare to have this many African-Americans on one team. So you try to suck it in as much as you can."