Chicago Cubs' Heyward reflects as MLB honors Robinson
Jason Heyward hiked up his uniform pants to show a lot of blue socks as he ran out to his position in center field Saturday.
He was joined by his Chicago Cubs teammates Javier Baez and Ben Zobrist.
The fashion statement was a tribute to Jackie Robinson, whom Major League Baseball saluted Saturday on the 70th anniversary of his breaking the modern-day color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Players around MLB wore No. 42 on their backs, Robinson's number with the Dodgers.
"Some things the game won't let you forget, which is awesome," said Heyward. "It's going to bring people together for a common reason, the game we love to play and love to watch as fans.
"It's one of the fun things about this game, you get to pay homage to a historic moment like this."
The number of black players in the major leagues has declined steadily in the last several decades, down to about 7 percent. Heyward is one of those players, and he cited several reasons for the low number, including a lack of college scholarships (11.7 per baseball team in Division I) and more options open to young athletes.
"As far as going to college, I feel like any household that says, 'Get an education, try to get out of here and do something better for yourself, start of family' and those kinds of things, the scholarship numbers in baseball are really low," he said. "There's not a lot of opportunity there. You look at trying to go to college and better yourself and get a job and set yourself up for a career even outside of sports, football has a lot higher numbers in that.
"So I feel like you're going to send more people in a direction where there's more opportunity. And, it hard's to make it in baseball regardless. You just want a better opportunity to make it."
Heyward said he does see kids playing baseball.
"As far kids playing in inner cities, I feel like there are a lot playing," he said. "Especially in Georgia, where I grew up, there's a lot of kids playing baseball, African-Americans playing baseball. It's all about pursuing that dream and having the means to do it and also being lucky and being able to make it."
Heyward was bitten by the baseball bug early.
"Football was always out in our household," he said. "My dad said no, just because it's a contact sport and all that stuff, really dangerous. Basketball, he played in college. His uncle played at UCLA. Baseball was the sport that he loved because of the Mets in the 1980s: Dwight Gooden, (Darryl) Strawberry, the team that won in '86.
"It was the sport he wanted me to try. I tried it at an early age. At 8 years old, I think, we won a World Series. We got to travel the country a little bit. It was rec ball, not really travel ball, competitive in the same nature that it is today.
"Travel ball allowed me to go see baseball games in other stadiums. I got to see Ken Griffey Jr. play, Alex Rodriguez with the Mariners, Randy Johnson. Once I saw that, I was like, 'I want to do this forever.' It just stuck. Here we go."