Emmanuel “Manny” Burris and Jared Williams know they stand out, if not entirely for the right reasons. Close friends since childhood who grew up in the District, they belong to an ever-shrinking fraternity: They are black professional baseball players.
“I’m not surprised when I look at a team’s roster and see just one African-American player,” said Burris, a switch-hitting shortstop for the Augusta (Ga.) GreenJackets, a Class A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.
Both Williams, who is with the Charlotte County (Fla.) Redfish of the independent South Coast League, and Burris played college baseball, which has an even smaller percentage of black players than the major leagues.
Burris grew up in the U Street/Cardozo area of Northwest and attended Kent State University in Ohio after graduating from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School. He was named Mid-American Conference player of the year after his junior season and was taken by the Giants with the 33rd pick of the 2006 amateur draft.
Williams, from the North Michigan Park neighborhood in Northeast, graduated from DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville and from Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y., last year. He wasn’t drafted and sat out his senior season because of academic issues, but he attended a tryout in Florida and was the No. 1 pick in the South Coast League draft in November.
Like many who ponder the question, Burris and Williams have their theories about why so many black youngsters do not play baseball at all or stop playing as they get older.
“It’s pretty obvious why,” Burris said. “The inner city is where most African-Americans are. The fields aren’t kept up. Basketball and football are the sports they want to play. Not many people want to play baseball if they have to play on a field the way it is in the inner city. Why go through all the bumps and bruises, the bad hops? You’ve got trash and glass, when a blacktop is right there and a basketball is all you need.”
Burris, who played several of his high school games on the Wilson football field, said of the few regulation diamonds available in the District, only Banneker Field, across Seventh Street Northwest from Howard University, is in decent shape.
“And that field, compared to any other suburban field, would be dead last,” he added.
There are signs, however, that the situation is changing. Williams’ father, Michael Williams, who heads Play Ball DC, the umbrella organization for youth baseball in the District, said city fields have improved over the past couple of years and more black youngsters are playing baseball. He credits the arrival of the Washington Nationals in 2005.
“I think the number is on the rise,” he said. “In D.C., the trend is different.”
Mr. Williams is encouraged that after his son and Burris, two more black players from the District have earned college scholarships — Landon School’s Marcus Jones for North Carolina State University and Gonzaga College High School’s Gerard Hall Jr. for Old Dominion University in Norfolk.
“I’m trying to get those four kids out there in terms of being role models,” Michael Williams said. “I don’t think they’re known in the community.”
The trend toward less participation by blacks was a long time in the making. There is, for example, the cost of playing baseball. Before he started his pro career, Jared Williams worked in Glen Burnie, Md., at Frozen Ropes, a franchised baseball training facility for young players. About 90 percent of the players were white, he said.
“Baseball is a more expensive sport to play,” he said. “You need a bat, a ball, a glove. Coming from the inner city, African-Americans don’t have a lot of money.”
Michael Williams said he was fortunate that he not only was able to provide the necessary equipment for his son, he could also send him to camps and clinics and afford to let him play on traveling teams.
“Baseball is not what it used to be when I was playing, when you could find a rubber ball, a bat and a wall,” he said.
The lack of black role models also has had an effect.
“When a young kid looks at television and sees baseball but doesn’t see any African-Americans in it, or they see Sammy Sosa and they see his skin color is black, but they know he’s not an African-American, they don’t give themselves that option,” Burris said. “It’s like playing golf or hockey.”
Michael Williams agreed with the popular notion that basketball and football are considered “cooler” or more glamorous sports than baseball.
“I saw it growing up,” he said. “Football players like Deion Sanders, they were just flashy. We wanted to be just like that. I had Allen Iverson shoes and wristbands. I wanted to be just like him.”
Jared Williams and Burris played other sports. Burris was a decent point guard on the Wilson basketball team, but baseball always was his “passion,” he said. Williams was a cornerback and return specialist for the DeMatha football team and earned a football-basketball scholarship at Wagner. But the grind was too much, and the coach who recruited him departed, so he quit football after two years.
“I didn’t see a future in football, and my [baseball] skills started to develop more,” he said.
So why did Burris and Williams come to love the game that so many of their peers and friends were rejecting? They had one more thing in common — interested and involved parents, especially their fathers. Allen Burris and Michael Williams took the time with their sons and nurtured their interest in the game.
“My father showed me at a young age I didn’t have to play on bad fields with bad equipment,” he said. “The only reason we had African-American kids on the team was that fields were kept up. If I played inside the city, the coaches would have lost a lot of players, and I would have had no competition.”
Jared Williams always liked football better, “and the only reason I got involved in baseball was because my dad played,” he said. “He taught me and developed my love for it. … I think I had supporting parents and a supporting cast around me, where a lot of African-Americans don’t have that growing up. They don’t have that father figure or that person to push them.
“I’ve always had the drive to play at a higher level, and I’ve always had the parents to guide me. It cost a decent amount of money, but they broke their necks and backs to make sure I could follow my dream.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.