Using Major League Baseball as a case study, Cornell research highlights potential shortcomings in diversity metrics that could obscure inequities in sports and other organizations.
The researchers' analysis of data from the major and minor leagues found that players and coaches from Latin America on average had shorter careers and were less likely to make it to the big leagues, reflecting unique obstacles despite MLB's proactive diversity initiatives and high grades for on-field diversity.
In interviews, Minor League Baseball (MiLB) players and coaches and two MLB education coordinators shared overall positive attitudes toward baseball's growing interculturalism. But they also described locker room cliques based on languages; disadvantages communicating with coaches who mostly speak only English; stronger feelings of inclusion among white players; and occasional incidents of bias. Those challenges could exacerbate struggles common to all minor leaguers: low pay, frequent travel and extended separation from families and friends, sometimes starting as teenagers.
"International Latino players face language and cultural barriers that aren't captured in the most commonly used measures of diversity," said Claire Malcomb, a doctoral student in the field of organizational behavior. "Our studies provide some evidence that despite high player and coach diversity grades in the majors, there is still work to be done."
Malcomb is the first author of a pair of papers published in Frontiers in Psychology, in a special issue on the role of cultural diversity in sports: "The Illusion of Inclusion: Examining the Limitations of Diversity Metrics in Baseball," co-authored by Emily Zitek, associate professor of organizational behavior in the ILR School; and "Beyond the Grind: The Intercultural Challenges and Cohesion Efforts in MiLB," co-authored by Zitek, Samuel Grossman '21, J.D. '24, and Benjamin Parris '20.
In The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport's (TIDES) most recent Racial and Gender Report Card, MLB earned A and A+ grades for player and coach racial diversity, respectively, based on 40.5% of players and 31% of coaches identifying as people of color. Those metrics, compared to other grades in the report - including a C for manager hiring and B+ for front-office hiring - could be interpreted to suggest that MLB should focus even more on front-office diversity, but the studies found they don't tell the whole story.
In the first paper, the researchers analyzed data including more than 50,000 major and minor league players from 1992 through 2022, and more than 1,000 coaches affiliated with 30 MLB teams in 2020. They surveyed nearly 150 players in the independent Frontier League prior to the 2022 season. In the second paper, they interviewed 18 minor league players and nine coaches in 2019, plus two education coordinators, whose initiatives already have made English-language classes and sometimes Spanish classes widely available at all levels of baseball.
While all pro players coped with mental and physical grinds in a sport where even successful players experience failure frequently, players' and coaches' experiences revealed unique barriers for international Latino players, the researchers said.
One coach described the challenge of needing a translator to communicate every instruction to those players. Another had to "keep it simpler" for international players who typically have not first played in college and may sign with teams at age 16, potentially arriving with less education or maturity. Describing apparent bias, a coach said there were things white players could "get away with" that a Black player couldn't, while a player said that coaches had yelled at Latin American players but not U.S.-born players for the same mistakes.
The researchers recommended that organizations such as MLB pay careful attention to how their data is measured, who their data includes and the limitations of what their diversity metrics show, or risk overlooking obstacles. For example, Malcomb said, international Latino players account for much of the diversity among players, while front-office diversity stems largely from that among U.S. citizens.
"Comparing the A grade among players to lower grades for other groups such as managers is misleading," Malcomb said, "because the causes for the differences in these scores, along with the solutions, are different for each group."
Simply counting "people of color" - the metric many organizations use to measure diversity - doesn't capture the diverging experiences people from different backgrounds may have, particularly at lower levels, the researchers said.
"Better understanding the population within baseball becomes especially important when considering how to improve diversity, equity and inclusion," Malcomb said. "The barriers and inequity faced by a U.S.-born Black player likely differ from those faced by an international Latino player. Despite this, under current diversity metrics, both are labeled 'people of color' and considered the same when making DEI policy decisions."
The research was partially supported by a grant from the ILR School.
