By Lee A. Daniels

They’ve discovered – again – that baseball really is just like America.

That’s the meaning I took from Thursday’s New York Times story pointing out glaring racial disparity in the game between the positions of first-base and third-base coach. At the first-base position, twenty of the thirty coaches are of African-American, Latino-American or Asian descent. Of the thirty third-base coaches, twenty-three are white, three are black and four are Latino.

The third-base position has always been considered a “field general’s” post – requiring “intellectual,” and “leadership” skills – and thus, is more prestigious; better paying, and a potential steppingstone to a manager’s position.

The Times article described the first-base position this way: “The first-base coach reminds runners how many outs there are and assists them in guarding against pickoffs and in attempting to steal (second base).”

Golly, fancy that. Sixty-some years after Jackie Robinson “broke” the ban against black players in Major League Baseball, and fifty-some years after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision fatally undermined legalized racism in the U.S., baseball still has an “internal” Color Line.

That’s true. But it’s also true that it’s more complicated than that now.

Just like in the larger American society.

Ironically, I’ve spent the past two months doing something I rarely do – reading books about baseball; for this summer marks the fiftieth-year anniversary of my turning away from the game I once cherished.

In the long-ago past of my childhood, August was the month when the summer turned serious.

That is to say, August was the month when the major league baseball pennant races shaped up and got down to business, as they’re doing now. Once the star-spangled pageantry of the mid-summer All-Star Game was done, only one important question in life for me remained: which two teams were going to get to the World Series.

That childhood obsession didn’t survive my eleventh year. Until then, I was a rabid baseball fan; and then, after the 1959 summer, I wasn’t. The following summer, 1960, I barely watched or played baseball at all.

Three books published this year among the usual pre-summer deluge of baseball books recalled for me why at the moment in adolescence I was discovering the meaning of race, I turned away from the game that was supposed to be a fundamental part of America’s character and social structure.

All three of the books are biographies. Two look at the lives and careers of two of the game’s greatest players:  James S. Hirsch’s Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, about the man some aficionados consider the game’s greatest all-around player; and Howard Bryant’s The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, baseball’s once, and still in the eyes of many, home run king.

Both are richly rewarding to read. Their subjects are fascinating as individuals as well as wondrous athletes who were always “game-changers” in the parlance of the present. And Bryant’s narrative of the dynamic of race and racism within baseball in the quarter-century after Robinson’s path-breaking act  is especially informative and gripping.

The subject of the third is a player many of today’s fans will not have heard of —  Dixie Walker, who spent his best years with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s before going on to a longer career on the managerial and coaching side of the game.

But it was the Dixie Walker biography – Dixie Walker of The Dodgers: The People’s Choice, by Maury Allen – that first caught my eye. It was the Walker biography which made me realize all over again how central racism was to Major League Baseball for most of the twentieth century – as it was to America as a whole — and how after World War II the black freedom struggle in the larger American society and the black freedom struggle in baseball became inextricably intertwined.

Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson (with a host of supporting characters) made it so. Those two combined in 1947 to break baseball’s Color Line – an act as important as the legal victories that marked the road to the landmark 1954 Brown decision.

Hank Aaron and Willie Mays were in the first cohort of black ballplayers to benefit from Rickey’s and Robinson’s pragmatism and courage.

But neither of these sports giants would have ever had the chance to prove their greatness if Dixie Walker, who was on the Dodgers’s roster in 1947, had his way. Walker, a Southerner with deep family roots in Birmingham, Alabama, where he then lived and had a business, halfheartedly tried to rally at least some of his teammates to protest Rickey’s plan to bring Robinson aboard, and when that went nowhere, he asked Rickey to trade him, which Rickey promptly did.

Dixie Walker had cast his lot with the wrong side of history and, even though he went on to have a long career in baseball as a player and coach before he died in the early 1980s, his advocates – and Maury Allen is one – claim that one act has unfairly denied him his rightful place in baseball’s pantheon.

They’re wrong – and it’s worth considering why precisely because major league baseball then occupied so mythic a place in American life.

The impulse with Walker that Allen suffers from is what I call the “nice man” mistake. He is so wrapped up in extolling the man’s basic decency, that he far too deeply discounts what the cost of the prejudices Dixie Walker—and most white Americans then – held were to the targets of his biases.

In baseball, the prejudices of men like Dixie Walker – owners, managers, players and fans —  deprived over the course of sixty years thousands of black and Latino ballplayers who had the skills to be in the major league ballplayers of their chance not just for sports greatness but to make a decent living. They put a whites-only sign on major league baseball that wrecked the dreams of generations of black and Latino boys and men.

Many people forget that prejudice cost Jackie Robinson himself an entire decade of major league baseball play.

Robinson, born in 1919, was a fabulous high-school athlete in Pasadena, California and went on to a fabulous collegiate career at the University of California at Los Angeles. But if major league baseball had come calling, he very likely could have been lured into its minor- league program before joining a big-league roster. That is what happened to two other southern California prep stars who graduated from high school in the late 1930s as he did and went on the baseball’s Hall of Fame: Ted Williams and Bob Lemon.

Are we, then, to sympathize with ordinary people like Walker who, when faced with making a choice about a great moral issue, make the wrong choice?

Should we sympathize with those who don’t actively participate in the wrong but merely go along to get along, so to speak? Should we to allow them to later plead they were merely following, as Maury Allen curiously describes twentieth-century Southern racism “the common cultural attitude of the time with few Southerners forgetting the indignities of the Civil War eighty years earlier”?

If so for Dixie Walker, then must we also sympathize with those whites who, to get along, everywhere refused to hire blacks, and opposed integrating the labor unions, schools, colleges, public beaches and swimming pools, public transportation, the military, hotels, restaurants, and anything else that would have accorded black Americans the civil respect that was supposed to be their birthright?

Major League Baseball, of course, like the larger society, has made considerable progress in recognizing that talent in all fields is not limited to white people, as the Times article points out as well. The concerted effort of baseball officials and activists on the outside has produced “enormous progress” in diversifying the league’s front-office ranks, according to the definitive race and gender “report card” issued by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

“Major League Baseball had its best year ever with continued improvement of its record on the issue of racial and gender hiring practices,” the Institute’s scorecard for 2010 stated, noting that as the League’s season began, there were nine managers and five general managers of color among its thirty teams, and substantial diversity in high-level positions at league headquarters, too.

In other words, the movement for equal opportunity Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey began in baseball in the late 1940s has charted significant gains off the field of play. Nonetheless, the unjustifiable limiting of coaches of color from the game’s third-base box is a sign that, just as in the larger society, the marching down freedom’s road isn’t yet done.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor in Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com. He worked with Rachel Robinson on Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait, a pictorial biography of their life together.