VERO BEACH, Fla. — On the surface, it looks like any other baseball tournament weekend in America. Young players from various teams are milling about the ballpark, parents have blankets across their laps and toddlers are doing everything but watching the ballgame on the field. But under the surface, there are little details that reveal the complex weave which makes up the tapestry of our sporting pastime at the amateur level in 2025.
A white guy with a white goatee and a trucker hat is wearing a long sleeve FAMU Rattlers shirt, looking like he wouldn’t be out of place at any hardware store in America. Latino toddlers in the crowd are teaching random parents phrases in Spanish. The one predominantly white institution of the group has more Black players than a couple of the historically Black colleges and universities here.
At the Andre Dawson Classic — the annual round-robin college tournament put on by Major League Baseball which is designed to highlight HBCUs and their baseball programs — the function is, in fact, not exceedingly Black. Sure, the public announcer is reading ads over mixtape Big X Tha Plug tracks, but there are no shortage of car keys rattling against Stanley cups in the parking lot, and we’re not talking about hockey. And for whatever reason, there’s a custom Louis Vuitton motorcycle on the grass in front of the stadium.
In many ways, the main character of the experience is the location. This year, just like last, the event was held at the Jackie Robinson Training Complex, the former Dodgertown facility that MLB renamed in 2019. The first integrated Spring Training site in the south, the history of this facility is flat out legendary baseball lore. It’s a designated Florida Heritage Landmark and it’s somehow the only sports venue that is officially on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.
Over the past 10 years, while numbers in the coaching ranks have remained embarrassingly low, HBCU rosters have gotten drastically less Black and PWI rosters seem to have found more ways to get Black players involved. Part of that is perception, part of it is reality, but when Kerrick Jackson was announced as the head coach of the Missouri Tigers in 2023, this sportswriter had to remind the nation that he was the first in the conference’s history.
Suddenly this season, there seem to be Black players on every social media post across the P4 landscape in baseball, but that could just be coincidence. To some people, perception IS reality.
The schools represent very much what this place historically does too: opportunity.
Jose Vazquez is a perfect example. A Puerto Rican, who just like Jackson played at Bethune-Cookman, he is now the head coach of Alabama State. He’s won five SWAC division titles and understands the changing face of what HBCUs actually are athletically because he embodies it.
“It goes back to what our universities have done, which is all about giving opportunities. So, I see it as a blessing, and I’m the prime example of that,” Vazquez said before his team beat Missouri. “I’ve been given an opportunity to lead a university with a great tradition, where, once again, no matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter. As a program, we do the same thing. I see that a lot differently, because, like I said, I’m part of living that experience.”
When you see guys that look like Yellawolf suiting up for Grambling State University on the diamond, it can be a little jarring, but it is what it is — as in, the game is the game — meaning, from a deeper perspective, historically Black doesn’t just mean doing things for Black folks. It means operating the way that many Black cultures historically have: helping others.
“Our society has changed. It’s individuals that want to come to HBCUs,” Alabama A&M interim head coach Louis Whitlow said after his team fell to Grambling 7-4 on Saturday. His dugout features multi-lingual chants but they all have similar haircuts. “As they say, you’re a product of your environment. You never know how people grow up. Sometimes they want to stick with what they know, sometimes they don’t, and that’s how we recruit.
“Man, you have to understand, No. 1, who you’re recruiting. But do they fit into your culture? Do they fit in your environment? And I think that’s what people are seeing, like it’s diversified. You get a lot of talent, but also guys are getting an opportunity to show their game on the HBCU side. And I think that’s the beautiful thing, is you see HBCU baseball catching up in different forms, where they’re competing with the mid-majors and the Power 5’s, because now you’re diversifying your talent. It definitely cannot be all minorities, but at the same time, reality is, you gotta diversify your team.”
It’s not like coaches are out here looking to handout proverbial cookout invites just to play baseball. Part of it is basic human nature. If you want to have a whole other convo about the true intentions of HBCU athletic departments, that’s a much larger fish to fry, so to speak. Just look at the fact that somehow Winston Salem State University, in one of the biggest baseball states in the country, played their last game as a program on April 24, 2019. I remember, because I was there.
“The coaches recruit who they’re comfortable with getting, and when you’re comfortable with getting a certain type of player, you try to get as many as you can and you don’t care what they look like or where they come from,” Southern head coach Chris Crenshaw noted while scouting another game. “But take a look at our team when you get a chance today. Tell me what you see.”
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
Before the weekend of the Classic, this columnist had never laid eyes on a multi-colored gecko. After three days at Dodgertown, I’d seen enough to reconsider what I was doing with my car insurance. The Treasure Coast as it’s known, is not some particularly unique stretch of central Florida and is complete with all the usual trappings. Senior living communities, deep sea family fishing excursions, and golf.
On any given day you can see various modes of transportation, quite literally from trains to planes to automobiles. But to say there’s a lot going on wouldn’t be remotely accurate. It’s a lot more Empty Nest than it is Golden Girls.
“We used to call it Zero Beach, because actually there wasn’t much fun to do in the town,” the late great Vin Scully, Dodgers radio man for decades, said during the 2006 Fox Sports West documentary titled One Spring Day: Vero Beach, USA. “There was one little movie [theater] and you had to walk to it and back. So most of the time the team and all the players hung around on the base.”
The legendary broadcaster was only telling part of the truth.
Not only was Vero Beach very actively a sundown town, but historic Dodgertown itself had segregated seating until 1963, a smooth 16 years after Jack Roosevelt Robinson integrated the Major Leagues.
“The bell rang before dark and Black people had to be out of town. The police’s job was to keep Black people in their place. If we were walking and they felt like we didn’t need to be there, they would pick us up and sometimes take us to jail. Police still think that’s their job,” Joe Idlette Jr. told Vero News earlier this month. Idlette, the first African American to be elected to the Indian River County School Board, was speaking about his parents’ experience.
In 1968, his lawsuit to integrate schools is considered one of the most important social decisions in the history of Indian River County. He also served as president for the Florida School Board Association and a state delegate for the National School Board. In 2018, the county renamed the Teacher Education Center after the civil rights pioneer.
“The Black schools were not compatible to white schools. We had a library with six books and no rigorous courses. We had to walk to school. Lesson plans were different,” he continued in a story about how education and faith have kept generations of his family together.
If you take a drive north to Gifford, you instantly understand a thing that — to the trained eye in America — doesn’t take more than a glance to recognize: this is where the Black people live. When you pass Dodgertown Elementary School and a place called MLK Food Store, you’ll come upon the Gifford Community Cultural & Resource Center which is housed in the Historic Macedonia Church, which was built by Black railroad laborers in 1908.
There are still old grave markers dating back to the 1800s on the lot, which is marked by a sign indicating the future home of a larger, revamped center, a project sponsored partly by the Department of State.
You could probably find some drastic marker of America’s horrific past in many nooks and crannies around various spring training sites, but at Dodgertown it wasn’t just an unfortunate truth outside of their idyllic walls, it was well-known by ownership and the players, too. Black players knew that if you wanted to kick it and not put your personal safety at risk, you had to leave not only the facility, but Vero Beach altogether.
“Gifford back in the day was the spot for all the Black players in Dodgertown. The place we felt most welcome and at home. All the Black people that worked in service at Dodgertown were from Gifford,” said Dave Stewart, who played for the organization in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “We used to get out of practice or games and head straight there. Easy to find a good domino, bid whist game. Do some gambling too, shooting craps. We could shoot some hoops too, good competition. I can’t remember Jessie’s last name, but he was the head chef. He’s the one who turned us on to the places to be and where to stay out of.”
Black women still operate that kitchen that feeds the young players in rooms where the walls are plastered with pictures of old Dodgers players and memorabilia. While the charm of racial harmony inside of the walls is an outcrop of Robinson’s legacy, it’s not hard to understand that this all wasn’t done just out of the proverbial goodness of his heart. It was a safety measure for his players, a protection of his investment. The more things they could do on site, like recreational sports such as I dunno, golf, the less chance they had of getting hurt in public. Yes, they built a golf course on site because Black guys couldn’t play at the one across the street.
Now, with people like MLB chief development officer Tony Reagins and former big leaguer and current MLB vice president of youth and facilities development Darrell Miller (who helped redesign the entire field setup and run the place), it feels like a moral victory of sorts, well beyond balls and strikes at Holman Stadium.
Since MLB took over the site in 2019, there have been over 25 upgrades including the development of Building 42, the indoor facility that allows for training to continue in the Florida weather, which is stunning and based on the model from the MLB Youth Academies. That space also happens to be the largest public gathering space in the entire county, an ironic twist. The nine principles of Jackie Robinson line the walls and it connects via walkway to the old Building 5 a.k.a. Campy’s Bullpen, named after Roy Campanella, where he used to set up shop and hold court at a card table.
They’ve effectively revamped the entire property, a literal investment in the game in Jackie’s name. MLB is moving the Hank Aaron Invitational to the JRTC this season and the symbolism of bringing the nation’s top Black high school players to such an important site for play and fellowship is obvious.
Dodgertown at least forced people to look at themselves in that era and contemplate their choices. Meanwhile, on the very same road where that historic graveyard rests, you don’t have to travel far to run into houses with big glaring signs and flags that say “Heritage, Not Hate.”
“Jackie Robinson was always my favorite man, like he is. He was a game changer for us, when I say us minorities, like he really gave us the opportunity,” Whitlow said. “I read the books, I’ve seen the stories, and it’s one of those things of just understanding what he went through to get us the opportunity. But then you see these things, centuries later, what’s being built up for baseball and now the opportunities we have to display the game on a national level. It’s a beautiful thing.”
AP Photo/Colin E. Braley
When the Missouri Tigers close out Black History Month at home against the Evansville Aces, they’ll be a well-traveled, but still inexperienced team. To start their season, they went 1-2 in the Puerto Rico Challenge, including losing a game to Stetson that they probably should have had.
“I’ve said it multiple times, we’re the Oakland A’s of the SEC, right? So we got to do a little bit differently than everybody else,” Jackson said. “It is getting our guys to understand there’s only one way to play the game, right, like and and the beauty of it is, the beauty of our game is really, really simple. You’re never playing against the other team. You’re playing against the game itself. The other team has no impact on our ability to throw strikes. They have no impact on our ability to play defense. They have no impact on our ability to play, and have quality at bats. And so if you go about your business the right way, you can put yourself in a position where you have a chance to win every game where we are in today’s society, because everything is based on results. We’re looking to the output before we understand what the process needs to be to put us in a position to get the desired output. And so these guys, that’s where we’re at with our team. We’re a really talented club, but they’re worried about producing, and you can’t produce if you don’t have the right process.”
In Vero Beach, their first game almost went to extras and we were 90 feet away from free baseball against FAMU. In their second game, it was a long slog with multiple umpire meetings and ended in a blowout. The Hornets of Alabama State were ready to play, as they were the whole tournament, which they dominated. The third game, against Jackson’s former team, the Tigers found their way and run-ruled the Jaguars. The fact that Jackson brought his team to Florida at all, in a lose-lose situation — if you win, you’re supposed to, if you lose, you look bad — is a testament to how serious he is about his commitments to advancing the game for not only our players, but coaches too.
In that last game, Trey Holloway — a veteran of MLB’s various development programs — got his first collegiate hit. Holloway is a catcher with dreads, somewhat of a double anomaly. There’s a reasonable argument that he quite literally would not be here were it not for the efforts that the league has made to identify, develop and build players to compete at the next level.
“Being able to surround myself with people, one that I know our philosophies align more important than anything else. But I also know that with these guys that I brought in here, I don’t need yes men,” Jackson points out while his team stretches on the field named Determination. “I need people that are going to make sure that we’re doing it the right way. And I say all the time, I don’t have to be right. I just have to get it right, right. And so, so whoever’s idea it is, it really don’t matter to me, right? And so I want to surround myself with people who are going to constantly challenge me on my thought processes and philosophies and continue to help me grow and develop as a coach. My mission is to create opportunities for minority coaches wherever they are, where we can possibly do that. And I’m not hiring minority coaches just because they’re minorities. I’m hiring them because they’re qualified to do the job and I’m in a position to give them a chance.”
In a world in which letters like DEI get thrown around a lot, and in a conference where it folks really like to get after it at the ballpark, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tigers saw a few signs in crowds at conference road games that read as such.
Assistant coach Jabari Brown is a product of a program that was literally designed for us. As the first recipient of Vanderbilt’s Maggie Corbin Minority Baseball Apprenticeship, he was on that staff for two seasons. According to the team, it’s a program designed to help participants gain “knowledge in skill and leadership development, practice organization, video analysis, scouting, analytics and program building.”
At Missouri, his mission is to keep building and keep climbing.
“I think that sometimes, as a young coach, I always thought it was just coaching the game, and it’s way more than that, especially when you, you know, you get to a university that cares about what’s going on as much as they do, but the process of what’s going on as much as anything,” Brown, who played at Claflin — an HBCU in Orangeburg, South Carolina — said between drills. As for being on the staff of the first Black head coach in the SEC, that obviously wasn’t lost on him.
“There’s different things for why you get into coaching. And that was the primary reason why I got into coaching. Obviously, I love the game, but to also show that you can go pro in many different avenues outside of the game itself and being on the field. Coach Jackson, his leadership role in being the head coach as well, and making sure the mission is the mission to show that there’s opportunity and not wasting opportunity when you get it is big.”
There will always be arguments about the best way to grow the game in our community. Folks will debate until they’re blue in the face about the price of the game, the so-called cool factor and accessibility issues. But in a country where the idea of discretionary funds to spend on leisure activities for your kids are becoming an impossibly difficult task to procure, for the game to save itself, investment is key.
“It goes back to that old argument that travel baseball killed opportunities for minority players. And there’s some credence to that. But what I try to get everybody understand, let’s not assume that all Black folks are poor,” Jackson pointed out matter of factly. “The reality of it is, when youth baseball became monetized — and when you looked at it in comparison to what people were playing — Black families were paying to play football and to play basketball. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it. I still think we have to go back and look back at what we’re doing with our kids at the youth level, and that’s where I think we’re losing. I don’t think it’s because of travel ball. I think that back in the day, when I grew up playing, you had coaches at the youth level for minority kids that could teach them how to play the game that doesn’t exist anymore, unless you pay for it.”
Major League Baseball has put quite a bit of money where its mouth is, and one thing commissioner Rob Manfred can be given credit for is writing a check and getting out of the way to let the folks who know what they’re doing cook. We’re learning every day that the collective social value of paying your way to the front versus spending actual dollars in real life American communities have wildly different effects on not just outcomes but our mindsets.
After decades of disenfranchisement, land grabs and cultural hegemony, all of which baseball as a sport has benefitted from in one way or another, the fruits borne from this particular tree of investment don’t appear so strange in the Florida sun. These days, for Black folks, it’s about something beyond just chances at this point. It’s about investment in time and energy in our success.
Because for us — as the slogan of the conference that just recently integrated its head coaching ranks and isn’t even the last major one to do it goes — when it comes to how we play the game, it just means more.