When the College World Series opens this weekend in Omaha, very few of the ballplayers will be black – a fact that in no way surprises celebrated comedian (and longtime New York Mets fan) Chris Rock.
Several years ago, Rock did a segment for HBO’s “Real Sports” that poked good-natured fun at many of baseball’s quirks to help explain the game’s sagging popularity among black youth. Echoing the complaints of many critics, Rock said baseball is too slow, too bland, and too wedded to its storied past to appeal to today’s hip-hop generation.
As humor, Rock’s rant touched all the bases. But as sociology, it failed to account for the most significant reason for declining participation in youth baseball: father absence. In America today, many boys – whether black or white – do not play baseball because they have no father present to teach them the game.
“We are looking at a generation who didn’t play catch with their dads,” observes University of Nebraska-Omaha researcher David Ogden. “Kids are just not being socialized into the game.” Ogden’s 15-year study of more than 10,000 youth baseball players shows that boys growing up in fatherless homes are less likely to play baseball, and less apt to succeed at it, than those that have a dad at home who can help them learn the finer points of the game.
Ogden reports that more than 90 percent of college baseball players were raised in two-parent households. And a similar study by researchers from BYU and the Austin Institute found that a disproportionate number of major league ballplayers were raised in an intact family. Importantly, the relationship between baseball participation and father presence proves to be statistically significant even after controlling for all sorts of socioeconomic factors.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, baseball participation rates are a fairly trivial concern. But these studies merit greater public attention because they help to illustrate just how far-reaching the effects of father absence are. Put another way, father absence doesn’t just affect all sorts of serious concerns like household income, student attainment, and violent crime. Father absence also affects a wide array of less-critical quality-of-life considerations – all the way down to the games children play (or don’t play).
Two things need to be said about this research on fatherlessness.
First, social science research findings are descriptive, but not determinative. Just because a child comes from a single-parent home does not mean that his or her life prospects are somehow doomed. In fact, the two most historically-significant baseball players of the 20th Century – Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson – both came from broken homes. And many other children who have grown up in a single-parent household have managed to overcome the challenges associated with parental absence.
Second, we do children in single-parent families no favor when we pretend that all household forms are equally likely to facilitate human flourishing. Children know better. They long for stability. They relish predictability. At some level, they understand that life is invariably harder when one parent is missing from the home.
Children yearn for interplay with their parents. Not surprisingly, a number of studies show that routine family bonding activities like reading bedtime stories and eating meals together have a profound effect on children’s educational development and psychological well-being.
This yearning for parent-child interplay no doubt helps to explain why the final scene in the movie “Field of Dreams” strikes such a powerful chord with many Americans. Apparently, there is something deeply satisfying about playing catch with one’s father.
As the College World Series opens this Father’s Day weekend, let’s hope more and more kids soon get to experience that satisfaction.
William Mattox is the director of the Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute. This piece is adapted from the most recent edition of “The Index of Culture and Opportunity,” a Heritage Foundation report updated every July.
