Baseball's Jackie Robinson Celebration.

Baseball gets one right with the Jackie Robinson celebration this weekend. But they have some ground to make up in following up on his legacy. It's great to see players from all over the world playing in the major leagues. I would love to see baseball build upon the the success of the World Baseball Classic with an eventual meeting of the champions of MLB and the Japanese professional league.

However, baseball needs to reverse the trend that shows the number of blacks participating in professional baseball dropping from 19% in 1995 to 8.5% today.

It seems like in the early 1990's, baseball was beginning to get the type of athlete that was being lost to other sports in the past. Bo Jackson, Deon Sanders and Kenny Lofton are a couple of prominent examples that come to mind. Heck, we even had Michael Jordan come over from basketball in his prime.

But somewhere around that time it seemed like we began losing a generation of African-American athletes at both the major league level and the youth levels. Baseball wasn't cool anymore, we're told. But when was it ever considered cool or exciting?

It seems almost as if when the rest of the nation was embracing the excitement of the Long-Ball Era, and that's what I'm going to refer to it as, not the Steroid Era, that blacks in America began turning away from the sport.

I'm not sure if it has to do with the fact that baseball has it's old-school traditions that don't allow for as much individual expression as the NBA and NFL.

It seems like the Cartlon Fisk v. Deon Sanders batters box confrontation or the Buck Showalter v. Ken Griffey Jr. confrontations regarding wearing the hat backwards during BP didn't have more to do with the declining numbers than most of us are willing to admit.

Can you imagine Deon high-stepping into home after a home-run? I thought that you could. Now could you imagine what might happen afterwards? I knew that you could do that as well? And so did Deon, and if he couldn't there was Carlton Fisk to tell him.

I still think the NFL and NBA do a better job promoting their stars and teams, although MLB is catching up in marketing savvy.

I'm glad to see baseball give America, both Black and White America, an opportunity to celebrate the courage, strength and dignity of a man who did as much or more to promote opportunity and racial equality and harmony in a positive way as virtually any man in the history of this country. It is in many ways difficult to imagine how much different all of our lives would be had this social experiment failed.

It's a vivid reminder of how the crucible of sports can affect and reflect who we are and where we are going as a society. For the sake of the memory of Jackie Robinson as well as baseball's prominence and position on the American sports scene, we have to do better in the future.