Blog 9 :)

For the mixed genre project, we have chosen an issue that has really taken off in the last month for sports fans. We are focusing on race in Major League Baseball, through both a historical survey and an interpretation of relevant current events. A main point of our project is to show the role that Jackie Robinson played in integrating baseball, and what he has meant to the sport ever since. Everything changed when he came onto the scene, and everything that baseball is today is because of him. For people looking at this project who are not entirely familiar with baseball, they need to get a real sense of how Jackie Robinson changed the sport and the Civil Rights Movement, in general. In order to do that, he is mentioned in the academic piece, and the creative piece focuses on Branch Rickey’s decision to sign him and what he thought it would mean to baseball before it happened. He will also be prominent in the visual aspect of the project. The other side of our project deals with the decline of African Americans in baseball through the past 3 decades, and what MLB is doing to help and hurt that problem today. With this side, we are looking at MLB’s RBI program, whose goal is to revive baseball in inner-city communities and start programs that will give African American children a solid foundation to play baseball. We are also looking at the decline from a statistical standpoint, because the numbers have consistently decreased since 1975, despite RBI’s 21-year existence. Because of this decrease, there have been comments from prominent black players in the media within the last few weeks about the role of blacks in baseball and a possibility of racism in the sport. These are especially interesting because they are coming from black players who have already made it big in the league, so they know first hand what it takes. The question, though, is why they would be drawing negative attention to MLB themselves, if the goal is to re-diversify. This ties into the exigence and timeliness of the argument because race and baseball has reemerged as an issue that has to be dealt with.

The academic essay makes an obvious logical appeal. It is a crucial part of the overall project because it shows with actual numbers how this issue is important to baseball. The decrease in black players from 1975 to today is unacceptable, and this gives people who need concrete data in order to believe in an issue the proof that they need. There is no arguing with the numbers, so it is an important part of the argument. The logos aspect of the argument does not act alone, however. The other parts of our project look at various other appeals. Bringing up racism in any form is an ethical issue. When we look at Torii Hunter and Orlando Hudson’s comments about baseball today, it raises the ethical questions of how MLB is run and how they make decisions on who to sign and why. For instance, when Hunter discusses how he believes Latino players are signed over black players because of money concerns, and how Latino players can be signed for “a bag of chips.” Obviously, the last part is an exaggeration, but it makes you question how the MLB makes these decisions, and what they should be doing to encourage signings of African Americans instead of discourage them. Hudson’s comments about racism in the free agent process are an entirely different kind of issue because he is talking about established major leaguers being passed over because of their race. That would obviously raise ethical concerns if it were true, and if it was not then it makes choosing baseball over other sports less likely for black kids. The mixture of ethical and logical dilemmas within baseball are hopefully made clear in our project, among other things, for both baseball fans and people who have never had much interest in the sport.