Black colleges facing pivotal time

Mervyl Melendez, the baseball coach at Bethune-Cookman University, respects his school’s distinguished tradition within the ranks of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

He tries every year to recruit African American players to the private liberal arts school, which has about 3,000 students at its Daytona Beach, Fla., campus.

“We offered, in November, seven African American kids scholarships. All but one rejected that offer and signed with different universities,” he said.

“After we were rejected we got kids from Puerto Rico. We recruited six, and all six said yes.”

And so Bethune-Cookman, whose student body is more than 91% black, fields a team in which African Americans are a minority, outnumbered by players from Melendez’s native Puerto Rico.

That’s not a bad thing. The idea, after all, is inclusion, to give all kids a chance to play.

It’s just a shame to see a tradition fade. It’s also a disquieting echo of the decline of African Americans in the major leagues. Last season, 9% of players on major league rosters were African American, down from about 27% in 1975.

“The numbers are not out there,” said Melendez, who has nine African Americans, six Caucasians and 16 Latinos on his 31-man roster. “It’s crazy, but that’s the reality. It is a sad reality.”

Although he loses many African American recruits to bigger schools, Melendez has managed to thrive, not just survive.

That’s one reason the Wildcats, 10-time champions of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, and the Southern University Jaguars of Baton Rouge, La., also an HBCU school, were invited to Los Angeles to compete in the Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy’s first Urban Invitational Baseball tournament.

They will join UCLA and USC in a round-robin tournament that starts today. Games will be played at UCLA, USC and the academy’s Compton campus.

“This is a tremendous way to highlight the contributions of HBCUs and baseball in general,” said Jimmie Lee Solomon, executive vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball and a fervent backer of the tournament and academy.

“It’s a high level of baseball, and many kids should get the chance to recognize that these schools are out there.”

Bethune-Cookman’s baseball connections are deep.

Jackie Robinson, playing for the Dodgers’ Montreal farm team in 1946, made his debut in Daytona Beach on the field now used by the Wildcats and renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark. One of Robinson’s friends in town was Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the university.

“The team has an ironic demographic,” Solomon said. “I wanted that to be seen by a lot of kids and others who don’t know about this program.”

Southern, which has sent Lou Brock, Danny Goodwin, former Dodger Reggie Williams and current Milwaukee second baseman Rickie Weeks to the major leagues, has about 8,000 students. More than 95% are black. On the 43-man baseball roster, four are Latino, 10 are Caucasian and 29 are black.

Coach Roger Cador, whose team became the first HBCU to advance in postseason play when it defeated Cal State Fullerton in the 1987 NCAA regionals, doesn’t have a huge budget. None of the HBCU schools do, because baseball is a non-revenue sport.

He compensates by recruiting heavily in Houston, 300 miles away. There, he mines players from another MLB-supported initiative, Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI).

“That one program has sustained me the last 10 years,” Cador said. “When I started, the two cities that mainly supported us in baseball were Chicago and Detroit. I got half my players from Chicago or Detroit. That dried up like a river in the desert.

“I have not gotten a player out of Detroit since 1987. They lost important ingredients -- they lost coaches and church-sponsored leagues, and if you don’t have people in those communities that live there and coach those kids, the kids aren’t going to stay in the game.”

Like Melendez and Cador, Solomon said basketball, with its brilliant marketing, and football, with its greater number of college scholarships, have lured kids away from baseball. Tears in the social fabric have inflicted considerable damage too.

“Baseball tends to be a generational sport. It’s passed to kids from a father, grandfather or uncle,” Solomon said. “In most urban situations you don’t have those father figures. Most families are dominated by females. We’re losing that connection.”

The Urban Youth Academy is trying rebuild it, link by link.

Solomon said the Dodgers, Angels and Oakland A’s have contributed time and coaching help, and he praised retired stars Dave Winfield and Frank Robinson for offering their expertise. But he said current players, “guys that kids may have seen on TV,” might have a greater impact in getting those kids to stick with baseball.

With that in mind, Solomon met with prominent African American players last November and extracted promises they would spend time at the academy when they visit the West Coast.

“Everybody’s committed to doing this,” Solomon said. “I look forward to seeing it happen. It’s going to be a fantastic support mechanism.”

That pledge shouldn’t be limited to African American players.

Every major league player and coach should support the academy and programs such as this weekend’s tournament. The game will be better for it.

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Helene Elliott can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.

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Urban Invitational

Schedule for Urban Invitational Baseball Tournament (tickets for games in Compton are $5 and will benefit the Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy):

Today, 6 p.m.: UCLA vs. Southern at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium; USC vs. Bethune-Cookman at USC’s Dedeaux Field.

Saturday, 5 p.m.: UCLA vs. Bethune-Cookman at Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy, Compton; approx. 8 p.m.: Southern vs. USC at Compton.

Sunday, 1 p.m.: Southern vs. Bethune-Cookman at Compton; UCLA at USC.