Tony Gwynn throws his hands in the air and shrugs his broad shoulders. Sitting on the edge of a black leather couch inside his office at the stadium named in his honor, the 15-time All-Star right fielder with the San Diego Padres is baffled.

In his first season as coach at San Diego State, Gwynn’s confusion has nothing to do with his transition from major-league batters’ boxes to college coaches’ boxes. After playing for nearly two decades in the racially diverse majors, Gwynn cannot understand why there aren’t more black college baseball players.

“It’s a mystery to me,” Gwynn said. “There are so many playing Major League Baseball, but not a lot in college.”

Although blacks constituted more than 17 percent of American-born major leaguers on opening day, they make up only about 2 percent of the players in the six major college conferences.

That is, there were 78 blacks in the big leagues on opening day but only 52 blacks among the more than 2,000 players in the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 10, Big East, SEC and ACC.

The pool of black baseball players is especially small in the Big Ten. This season there are three black players in the conference, and only Indiana outfielder Reggie Watson is on a Big Ten 25-man travel roster.

The trend has been particularly prominent at Northwestern, where the last black player, Patrick Wright, was on a football scholarship and graduated in 1994. NU coach Paul Stevens has had fewer than five blacks play for him during his 16 seasons in Evanston.

“It’s really a combination of financial aid and academics,” Stevens said. “The situation with blacks has been the same and there has not been any huge difference in the racial makeup of college baseball since I have been coaching.”

Aside from the limited number of scholarships and stricter academic requirements, recruiting practices and decreasing numbers of blacks playing the sport in the inner city contribute to the small number of blacks in college baseball.

But some, such as Roger Cador, the coach of Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., see a fundamental problem at the collegiate level.

“Football and basketball coaches feel they need black athletes to win, but baseball coaches don’t think they need them,” the black coach said. “It’s psychological. They believe they can win with white kids. It’s a clear black and white issue.”

Nobody’s watching

The 61 teams in the major conferences have very few black players, and none has Rickie Weeks. None of the schools in the major conferences recruited Weeks, the black Southern University second baseman, projected to be one of the top selections in this June’s professional draft.

At the historically black Division I school, Cador has developed quality major-league prospects. In the past two years, nine players were drafted from Southern. In both seasons the team had an individual selected in the opening rounds.

Cador’s team had five players drafted in 2002. That is more than every Big Ten team besides Michigan State, which also had five.

“I don’t think coaches are racist, it’s just easier for them not to go after black players,” Cador said. “Coaches don’t want to make the extra effort to find these kids.”

Maryland native Kennard Jones said he started to receive looks from college coaches coming out of high school only after he switched from an all-black team to a more prestigious white squad.

Last season as a center fielder for Indiana, Jones was one of three players named Big Ten Player of the Year. The San Diego Padres selected the only black Big Ten Player of the Year in recent history in the third round of the draft.

NU center fielder David Gresky remembers playing against Jones but never thought about the small number of black baseball players.

“I never really noticed, but it’s definitely true,” said Gresky, who is white. “There weren’t many in Ohio, and I’ve only played with maybe one or two.”

Coming out of high school in California, Jonathan Tucker was a highly touted prospect. But like Jones, the black Florida second baseman was not always heavily recruited.

“I played on an all-black team when I was 15 in Oakland, and no scouts were coming to watch,” said Tucker, an honorable mention Freshman All-American last season. “I changed to a white team, and even though the black team was better, the scouts came out more when I was with the white players.”

College coaches want the best players no matter what race, but some coaches said players from poorer areas with less organized leagues often lack fundamentals that coaches don’t have time to develop in only four years.

Professional scouts said college coaches are making assumptions based on track records from previous experiences, and Tucker agreed.

“The black team was in a rough area,” Tucker said. “Many coaches may have found the white players will be less of a hassle and more reliable off the field.”

General Admission

Baseball helped save Dennis Wyrick’s life. It was the black Arizona State third baseman’s little league coach who adopted him at age 10 after his father left, and baseball was his escape.

Although he had incredible talent and passion for the game, he was almost forced to play college football instead because of the financial and academic circumstances in college baseball.

Without the full ride Arizona State gave him, the senior would have played defensive back at one of the schools that offered him a football scholarship such as Florida or Michigan.

“I was uneducated about college baseball before I came, because I thought everyone got a full ride,” Wyrick said. “Once here, I realized how rare it was that I had a full scholarship.”

The limited number of scholarships and high academic expectations restrict many college coaches when they’re recruiting, especially in the inner city.

The reason many baseball players only receive partial scholarships is not because of a lack of commitment from schools, but because NCAA guidelines tie coaches’ hands. Virtually no college baseball program offers full rides, because teams are allocated only 11.7 scholarships.

In comparison, football has 85 scholarships and basketball, with a roster a third of the size of baseball, has 13. Even softball, which uses about half the number of pitchers, is afforded 13 scholarships.

“There is no question that there is inequality in scholarships,” said John Anderson, who is in his 20th season as coach of Minnesota. “Baseball has the lowest percentage of scholarships to participants among any of the men’s and women’s sports. It’s discrimination.”

With more than 30 players on college rosters, the average baseball player receives about a third of a scholarship — equivalent to tuition costs, but not room or board at most public schools, and only about half of the tuition fees at private universities such as NU.

The scarcity of financial aid hurts the private schools in recruiting, and even at a state university such as Minnesota, coach Anderson said his biggest success is when he can sign a player for less money than another school offered.

“I could count on one hand the number of kids who have been on full ride in my 23 years here,” Anderson said. “Major leaguer Dan Wilson was on full scholarship because he was a great catcher and pitched for us.”

UCLA coach Gary Adams also only offers full rides to pitchers that excel at another position. But in Adams’ 29 years at UCLA, he has found academics to be an even larger limitation than money.

“I really wish there was a radar gun that would tell you a kid’s GPA and SAT score when you’re watching them,” Adams said. “There’s a lot of players I like when I’m watching them play, but there’s no way they could get into our school.”

The experienced coach knows how to find talent in central Los Angeles, and this season Adams has three black players on his team, which puts it even with Auburn as the school
with the most black players in the six major conferences.

But Adams is restricted by academic requirements, and he isn’t the only baseball coach convinced that his players don’t benefit from the lower standards that allow other athletes to slide through the admissions process.

“We can get at most one or two guys who are not general admits, but football and basketball get a lot more,” Adams said. “At least 95 percent of our players could get in on grades alone.”

Bases Empty

John Young grew up playing baseball in the parks of South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s. All of his friends played baseball, and black major leaguers came back to scrimmage with the black little leaguers in the offseason.

After signing a pro contract out of high school and playing briefly with the Detroit Tigers, Young came back to his hometown as a professional scout. The scouts evaluate many of the same players as the college coaches but spend even more time searching for talented players.

“All the scouts in the South and in California would talk about how there were not as many blacks as there use to be,” Young said. “Everyone was talking about losing inner-city athletes to basketball and football. I wanted to get the kids to play baseball.”

Young founded the Reviving Baseball in the Inner City, known as RBI, program in 1988 to encourage kids to play baseball. Today there are more than 185 RBI programs that stretch to cities across the country such as St. Louis and New York.

To achieve the same goals, Bob Williams founded the prestigious Area Code Games, which showcase national high school talent. He supports the RBI program and the creation of more programs to encourage minority participation in baseball.

“In the past, there were considerably more black players out there,” Williams said. “If they’re there scouts will get them. Scouts are not afraid to go into the inner city.

“We have tried to do everything to get the black athletes, but we have seen less and less of them playing baseball in the inner city.”

Williams and Young know where the players go — the basketball court and football field.

The high-profile exposure of select, traveling basketball teams and powerful, high school football programs that are the only show in town lead many young athletes away from baseball. The money Nike and Adidas pump into these high school programs also makes the other sports more glamorous.

Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido has won three national championships in his 34-year career. He said some of the best players go to pros from high school but more play other sports.

“The African-American society in the inner city is about money, prestige and honor,” said Garrido, who is white. “Allen Iverson could play shortstop in the major leagues. Scouts say there aren’t enough quality middle infielders, but the middle infielders in the U.S. are playing cornerback and running back.”

The problem is that the running backs and point guards in the inner city have nowhere to take batting practice and nobody to teach them how to throw a curveball.

Scouting the Los Angeles area for more than a decade, Young and Williams said the schools in the city don’t have the same quality of fields or coaches as suburban schools.

NU baseball recruit Caleb Fields has experienced a similar situation in Chicago while playing at Fenwick High School, a Roman Catholic school on the South Side.

“Schools in the city don’t spend the type of money on baseball as other sports,” said Fields, who is half black. “A lot of the schools don’t even have their own fields. Even in our league there’s a difference between the black and white schools.”

Fields has signed with the Wildcats and is leaning towards attending NU, but he will wait to see where he is chosen in the June professional draft before making his final decision.

In high school, basketball coaches attempted to persuade Fields to quit baseball and play only basketball, telling him there was a greater chance of getting a basketball scholarship.

And Fields, like black college baseball players Tucker and Wyrick, admitted that his black friends weren’t interested in baseball.

“It seems like baseball is not very popular here with black people,” Fields said. “That could be because there aren’t many black coaches around here.”

Leaders of the black baseball community, such as Young in Los Angeles and Cador in Louisiana, believe the lack of black coaches at the lower levels also leads younger players away from the game.

“I’ve had white baseball coaches my whole life, and it does not make a difference to me,” Fields said. “But a lot of black baseball players need to identify with a black coach.”

No Simple Solutions

Setting his black Aztecs hat down on the glass table, Gwynn talks about the changes that could — and need — to happen to increase the number of blacks in college baseball.

“I’ve been around college baseball for the last year and there are no easy answers,” Gwynn said. “There are so many different issues to deal with.”

There are proposed solutions, such as more scholarships to allow coaches to recruit in poorer areas and to make the game more attractive to young black players.

Major League Baseball, which recently announced plans to open an academy in northern Los Angeles in 2005 to develop talent, could invest more money to promote the game.

More coaches and fields in the inner cities could groom more black players for college.

“It’s an ongoing issue that the best black athletes do not play baseball,” said Gwynn, who attended college on a basketball scholarship. “They want the stardom. My brother used to scout in the inner city looking for athletes, and a lot of black kids told him baseball was boring.”

Gwynn never found the game a drag, and he remembers his collegiate days in the early 1980s when he was one of the only blacks on the San Diego State team.

This season Gwynn has three black players on his team, including his son, Anthony, but last season there was only one black player in the Mountain West Conference other than his son.

The proud father brags about his son before he realizes it’s time for practice and runs out of his office toward the field.

Gwynn has not found many problems in baseball he cannot solve, and the eight-time batting champion hopes to add this to his list of more notable accomplishments.

“I don’t want to blame anybody — I’m just nosy by nature,” Gwynn said. “But you just have to question why there are so few blacks in college baseball. It’s amazing.”