The Joyful, Exuberant José Fernández Changed What It Means to Play Baseball the Right Way – Slate Magazine

As Jay Caspian Kang noted in a New York Times Magazine story headlined “The Unbearable Whiteness of Baseball,” baseball’s demographics have shifted multiple times since Jackie Robinson broke the game’s color line in 1947. That season, 98.3 percent of players were white, 0.9 percent were African-American, and 0.7 percent were Latino. By 1975, 71.3 percent of major leaguers were white, 18.5 percent were African-American, and 10.2 percent were Latino. At the start of the 2015 season, white players represented 58.8 percent of all major leaguers and 8.3 percent were black, while the sport’s Latino minority had grown to 29.3 percent of all major-league players.