Sunday, April 15 marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event that changed baseball history - and American history as a whole. Jackie was an incredible athlete - one who lettered in four sports at UCLA and was an All-American football player before settling on a career in baseball - and a strong, principled individual. He once was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a segregated military bus, long before Rosa Parks entered America's collective mind. Tributes to Jackie are everywhere; even noted bigot Todd Jones is getting into the act - he penned an article for Yahoo! about how tough it must've been for Jackie to overcome the prejudices of his teammates. (I can't make this stuff up.) So, Major League Baseball is rightfully celebrating the 60th anniversary of Jackie's debut nationwide; between these festivities and the made-for-television Civil Rights Game on March 31 featuring our Cardinals, it certainly appears MLB is pulling out all the stops to pander to the African-American portions of its fan base. And all this fanfare comes at a time which MLB's percentage of black players is at its lowest since the 1950s. According to a recent article in the Post-Dispatch:

While Major League Baseball has made recent strides in elevating the number of minorities in its front offices and the central office, it has fought a losing battle against the well-known attrition of black athletes. Of players on major league rosters last season, only 8.7 percent were African-American.

I'm getting a sinister vibe here; MLB has made a fairly public point that it will do whatever it deems necessary to maximize its profits - take the recent Extra Innings/DirectTV, uh, agreement as an example. So, just as expected in the case of Jackie Robinson Day, the public relations machine is operating at full speed ahead - MLB.com has created an entire page devoted to Jackie and the celebration on Sunday, which likely took thousands of hours from their staff writers and web design group. Large for-profit corporations such as MLB don't just spend those kinds of resources out of goodwill; they spend them, in this case, in order to gain market share. A MLB representative even admitted as much in the aforementioned Post-Dispatch article:

Baseball, Solomon said, has also fought a losing marketing battle against basketball and football.

A losing marketing battle! Other sports aside, note the absence of a similar magnitude of official MLB server space devoted to Minnie Minoso or Roberto Clemente, two pioneering Latin players of the same era. Why? Perhaps it's because baseball has a wide following in Latin America, and the Latin minority is much better represented among its players (29.4% according to the same UCF study quoted in the Post-Dispatch). The Latin market doesn't need the investment to give MLB the return it wants, so MLB has decided to spend its money on African-Americans in the hope that they will return the favor. It's not the only reason for Jackie Robinson Day, but you'll have a hard time convincing this baseball fan that the marketing aspect of the day doesn't play a part in MLB's decision to promote it as much as they have.