In the context of Australian cricket’s struggles to broaden the demographic base of the game, it’s been intriguing to observe a curious phenomenon developing in baseball – the number of African-Americans in the major leagues has been rapidly dwindling. For a sport whose proudest moment was bringing Jackie Robinson to the fore a decade ahead of the Civil Rights Movement, the trend is staggering. Almost 20 percent of all big leaguers in the mid-1980s were African-American; the number on opening day rosters this year was 8.5 percent, according to the Society of American Baseball Research.

Plenty of reasons have been advanced for this decline: the increased cultural power of football (sound familiar?), the growing internationalisation of the game (best seen in Inside Sport last March on the Aussies’ World Baseball Classic team), baseball’s lack of presence in inner cities, and perhaps the critical one – the increasingly prevalent view that it’s become a sport only for the suburban well-off. Major League Baseball has become sufficiently concerned to create a task force looking into the subject. Speaking to the New York Times, baseball commissioner Bud Selig posed a question that many fans would be asking: “You say to yourself, ‘Why did it not continue?’” It’ll be interesting to see what the task force finds, even if what baseball can possibly do to reverse the trend is limited.