Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Moon senior Adrian Sykes -- "It's discouraging to look around?and not see any [African-American] faces. Click photo for larger image.

Twenty years ago, Allderdice High School had one of the best baseball teams in Pennsylvania, making it to the state semifinals. Three of the team's starters were African-Americans, including Tom Johnson, who was selected in the 11th round of the Major League Baseball draft.

This season, Allderdice has 20 players on its varsity. Only one is African-American.

At Duquesne High School, the last time the baseball team won a section championship was 1987. Five of the starters and some of the reserves on that team were African-Americans.

This season, Duquesne is down to 11 players. And although the school population is 90 percent African-American, only two blacks are on the baseball team.

These are signs of the times. Statistics show fewer African-Americans around the country are playing baseball, and high schools in Southwestern Pennsylvania offer a prime example.

"That's why we haven't been too good in baseball lately. We can't get some of our best athletes out for the team," said Mike Zmijanac, athletic director and football coach at Aliquippa High School.

Aliquippa is a school where African-Americans have excelled in football and basketball for decades. The football team won WPIAL and PIAA titles last season -- with only a few white players. The basketball team won its second consecutive WPIAL title -- without one white player. Aliquippa's baseball team, though, has 15 players -- and only five are black. The Quips are 0-11 in baseball.

Woodland Hills has produced more than 40 Division I college football players since it opened in 1987 and more than 80 percent of those have been African-Americans. In baseball this season, Woodland Hills does not have one black player on the varsity and only one on the junior varsity. The Wolverines are 3-9.

Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Shawntez Bryant, one of only two African-American players at Duquesne, waits for his turn to his this week. "We'd be one of the top teams if we could get more of the kids to play," he said. Click photo for larger image.

Beaver Falls also has been known for some top African-American football and basketball players over the years. But the Tigers' baseball team has one black player.

Although African-American teenagers in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas have never flocked to the baseball fields as much as they have to basketball courts or football fields, the dwindling number of blacks on baseball diamonds the past few decades has been astonishing.

In Allegheny County, 13 WPIAL public school districts have African-American student populations higher than 10 percent. Twelve of the districts field varsity baseball teams (Wilkinsburg does not), and there are only 18 African-Americans on those rosters. Clairton has eight African-American players.

"It's discouraging to look around baseball diamonds and not see any [African-American] faces," said Adrian Sykes, a senior standout at Moon and the only black player on the team. "I believe there are a lot of talented African-American youth who could play and do well."

Jamie Demery is one of the two black players at Duquesne.

"A lot of kids in school don't even think baseball is a sport any more," he said. "They ask me why I play. It bothers you that none of them play. I try to persuade them, but it doesn't work."

A lack of black baseball players in Southwestern Pennsylvania high schools is a microcosm of what has happened to baseball around the country at all levels. According to a Sports Illustrated survey, only 10.5 percent of all players on Major League Baseball opening day rosters in 2003 were African-American, compared to 27 percent in 1975.

"I definitely think it's a problem that African-American kids aren't playing," said Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon. "But I think there are a lot of contributing factors."

Why they don't play

Players, coaches, school administrators and a sports psychologist have varying opinions on why African-Americans are passing on the national pastime. The five reasons given most often are: a lack of good feeder programs, such as Little League; better marketing of football and basketball toward African-American youth; the age of sports specialization, where high school athletes concentrate on only one sport; the cost of baseball, which is too expensive for some parents; and a change in the African-American teenage culture.

Don Nania is in his first year as coach at Allderdice in the City League, but he played at Allderdice from 1968-70 and has been a teacher in city schools for 25 years.

"I've taken a vested interest on why we're not getting the African-American kids on the fields," Nania said. "What I've found out is a lot of them are in poor-structured feeder programs, and the coaching isn't there. What happens is, those programs either fold or the kids on those teams get beat in games so badly that they don't want to play any more."

	Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image.

The RBI baseball program -- Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities -- is in almost 200 cities across the world and is sponsored by Major League Baseball and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Charlie Saunders runs the Pittsburgh chapter and has 13 teams (ages 13-19) in such areas as the Hill District, Garfield and Beltzhoover.

"One of our biggest problems of getting African-American youth to buy into baseball is we struggle to find adults with enough initiative to run teams, and there aren't enough adults who know enough about baseball to coach it," Saunders said.

The closing of some recreation centers in the city has hurt baseball because some of the workers at those recreation centers were good youth coaches, Saunders said.

Duquesne High athletic director Montel Staples said Little League baseball practically disappeared in the district for about 10 years. It is trying to make a comeback.

"When I was young, I'd say our Little League program was beautiful," said Omar White, Duquesne's baseball coach and a 1987 Duquesne graduate. "But then there wasn't enough money and not enough volunteers to keep it going, so it folded. If kids don't play when they're young, they're not going to play in high school."

The age of sports specialization and the glamour of high school football might be the biggest cause of African-Americans giving up baseball. Shane Brooks is a good example. He was expected to help Duquesne's baseball team this season. He is strong, runs well and had excelled at the sport when he was younger. Brooks was planning to play and was working out with the team but decided to quit a few weeks before the season started. The reason? Football.

"I already had some full scholarship offers in football," said Brooks. "It's not that I was scared to play baseball, but I just wanted to better myself for football."

Brooks has football scholarship offers from 10 colleges, including Pitt, Syracuse and West Virginia.

"I'd rather just run and lift weights for football," he said. "It's not like baseball is bad. It's just slow. I think kids nowadays see football and basketball as more exciting sports. Baseball is looked at as the old-man sport."

Steve Breaston is a Woodland Hills graduate and a football receiver at the University of Michigan. By all accounts, he was a pretty fair shortstop and outfielder in baseball but gave up the sport after his sophomore year at Woodland Hills. He ran track as a junior and senior.

"I'd say I gave up baseball for football," Breaston said. "I saw most of my friends started running track and started conditioning for football. So I decided I wanted to do what they were doing.

Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image.

"I think kids see that if you want to get a college scholarship, you want to direct yourself to football. You see the chances of getting a baseball scholarship around here are pretty slim. I think that's why African-Americans are going more toward football."

Ron Leith has been Woodland Hills' baseball coach for 11 seasons. He has never had large numbers of African-Americans on his team, but he believes it will be rare now when he has more than one. In the late 1990s, William "Tutu" Ferguson was a talented center fielder for Woodland Hills but quit early in his senior season. Ferguson went on to play football at Pitt.

"Pitt started getting on him about starting to lift weights," Leith said. "He had 18 stolen bases in our first six games. I think he'd have been drafted in baseball, but he quit for football.

"We don't get the best athletes here any more, and it makes it tough. But that's the nature of the beast. Football is just too big, and it's year-round now. But it's not just Woodland Hills. It's everywhere."

McClendon has a 16-year-old son, Bo, who plays football and baseball in Merrilville, Ind.

"He plays football in stadiums that are packed," McClendon said. "All the girls are cheering for the football players. and the players see all the fans. You go to a high school baseball game, and 30 people are there. So a kid is going to naturally go more toward football if he's going to play only one."

Aliquippa's Darrelle Revis is one of the top athletes in the WPIAL, a star in football and basketball. He has a scholarship to Pitt for football but might also try to play basketball for the Panthers. He has never played baseball because he never had an interest in the sport. Neither did most of his friends.

"Could you see what would happen if a kid like Revis just gave baseball a chance?" said Freedom baseball coach Steve Wetzel. "I think it would be scary. Could you see him in center field running down a ball? If I was coaching and he got on first base, he'd be on third in two more pitches."

Chris Glass, an African-American, played baseball at Freedom this season for the first time since he was 12. He was a standout football player for Freedom and also was on the basketball team.

"He's a perfect example of what can happen with a good athlete," Wetzel said. "The first game he ever started, he was 3 for 4 with six RBIs. He came out totally raw as a baseball player, but, just because of his athleticism, he got to be pretty good."

But many African-American teenagers would rather be "good" in football or basketball than baseball.

McClendon said: "I think one of the biggest problems is baseball is one of the most difficult sports to play. In basketball, you can be a good shooter and be a good player. In football, you can just run or block. In soccer, you can be good if you can kick. There are so many things to master in baseball, and kids just don't want to spend the time at it."

Carole Kunkle Miller is a sports psychologist in Mt. Lebanon who works with professional and amateur athletes to achieve peak performance in sports.

"Nothing has changed with African-American athleticism," Kunkle Miller said. "But the culture has changed in terms of their perception of baseball and how playing it is not as cool as basketball or football. The culture has changed in terms of everything being more fast-paced, even with television commercials."

Zmijanac often hears the complaint from Aliquippa kids that baseball is too slow. "A lot of these kids want bells and whistles going off when they play a sport now."

Baseball also is a sport that can be expensive.

"It can be awfully hard for single parents to afford baseball," McClendon said. "There are bats, cleats, gloves, uniforms. A good aluminum bat nowadays can cost $250."

Selling baseball

Zmijanac believes Major League Baseball has not done a good job of marketing the sport to youth.

"Look at World Series games. They start after 9 o'clock. Kids can't watch those games," he said. "I'm not sure many African-American kids identify with baseball players anymore. They see basketball and football is where it's at."

McClendon agrees.

"The NBA and NFL have done a great job in marketing their sport better, and, as a result, the kids like that glamor," he said.

NBA and NFL players are often featured in television commercials, many times pushing shoes.

"You don't turn on TV and see Derek Jeter with a commercial for his spikes, do you?" Duquesne's Demery said. "We see a lot more of LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony [for basketball]."

Sykes, though, gave up football and basketball after his eighth-grade year at Moon and concentrated on baseball.

"I don't think it's marketing that gets kids because I think it's pretty cool to be a baseball player," Sykes said. "But to some [African-American] kids, hearing a story about a kid who grew up in New York where all he had was a basketball and a dream seems to be a pretty neat story rather than baseball."

The future

McClendon believes baseball could become big for African-American teenagers again.

"It can change, just like it changed for the worse," he said. "But it's not going to happen overnight, and we need to take a more active role in getting involved, particularly on the financial side."

This summer, Major League Baseball will construct its first Youth Baseball Academy in Compton, Calif. The complex will have baseball and softball fields, in hopes of stirring up interest among inner-city youth. Major League Baseball hopes to construct similar academies around the country.

Allderdice's Nania is a project administrator in Pittsburgh for NYSP (National Youth Sports Program), a federally-funded program designed to help promote eight sports, including baseball, to inner-city kids.

Saunders is hopeful the RBI program -- in its fourth year -- will continue to grow.

"In the fall, you go to any area that has an RBI program and you'll see a dynamic youth football program, whether it's Duquesne, Garfield or Beltzhoover," Saunders said. "On game days, you can't park within blocks of their football fields. We have to get the adults that way with baseball and keep providing kids with alternatives."

Zmijanac said he is a big baseball fan, but added, "African-Americans don't identify with baseball the way they used to, but I think the sport has fallen out of favor with a lot of Americans overall."