Wednesday marked the 67th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier to become baseball's first African-American player. And in the decades that followed, the game became far less white as more and more African-American players followed Robinson's path.
Yet now, that trend has begun to reverse, as this chart from Pew shows:
In 1981, the share of black players peaked at 18.7 percent. That number fell all the way to 8.3 percent this year. Meanwhile, baseball's international outreach has resulted in a sharp uptick in the number of foreign-born players from Latin America and Asia in that same span.
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So what's driving that trend of dwindling black ballplayers? As our Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently, it's largely the result of globalization and capitalism re-segregating baseball by turning it into "an exurban game" that caters domestically to wealthy whites.
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