Daryl Thompson: One of an Endangered Species

The Reds have gone into Yankee stadium and in three consecutive games, their starting pitchers have held the Bronx Bombers, who are just beginning to wake from their early season slumber, to three runs.

That's pretty spectacular work for the Reds, but what’s more impressive is the guys who have been on the hill for Cincy. You’ve certainly heard of Johnny Cueto and Edinson Volquez, the two fireballing phenoms around which the Reds are building their future. Volquez has been electric, with a 10-2 record to go with a microscopic 1.71 ERA and 1.17 WHIP and 110 Ks against 45 walks. Cueto has similar strikeout numbers (81 against 34 walks) but has been more hittable, with a 5-7 record against a 5.01 ERA and 1.36 WHIP, although those numbers have been improving since the start of the season.

The third, who pitched five shutout innings yesterday, but didn’t get the win, is Daryl Thompson, a lesser light taking the place of Homer Bailey. Thompson doesn’t have the meteoric trajectory expected of Cueto and Volquez, although he should be a good source of strikeouts and should do well, if he can keep the ball in the park, a problem with him in the past.

But Thompson has something that Cueto and Volquez don’t: he’s an African-American pitcher, a real rarity in baseball these days. (Both Volquez and Cueto are Dominicans). If he sticks in the rotation, he’d join C.C. Sabathia, Dontrelle Willis, Ian Snell and Edwin Jackson as the only black starters in baseball. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that in 2004, it was only Sabathia, Willis and Darren Oliver. Thompson would bring the count to six, double what it was four years ago.

Small surprise that it doesn’t take much to double the number of African-American starters. Overall, they represent only 3% of all pitchers, even lower than the 8% of all MLB players who are black, which is half of their percentage from 1997. The reasons for this are manifold, from the high price of entry for kids into baseball (which requires not only bat, ball and glove, but a reasonably open, green space to play it in, none of which are easy to come by in inner-city America) to the long, narrow road baseball players must travel to the professional level.

NCAA Division IA programs average 100 football scholarships, 13 for basketball, and about 11 for baseball (many of which are partials spread among more than one player). Basketball players can earn millions straight out of high school, football players can start within a year or two of leaving college, but baseball players may not make the big leagues until age 25 or later (if at all). Pitchers have an even less sure path to success. Plus there’s the influx of Latin and Asian players to take up more of the available roster spots, meaning that all players must compete more to make a major league squad.

It wasn’t always so—black pitchers have often been at the top of baseball’s best list. Satchel Paige is often acknowledged as the best pitcher of all time (even if his chance to prove it in the majors didn’t come until he was in his forties), Don Newcombe was the first—and only—player to win Rookie of the Year, Cy Young, and MVP in the same season, and Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in 1968 was not only the best mark in the live-ball era, it’s often acknowledged as one of the main reasons that pitching mounds were lowered in 1969.

Until the 1970s, we had such luminaries as Gibson, Newcombe, Vida Blue, J.R. Richard, Dwight Gooden, Fergie Jenkins, Blue Moon Odom. There are, in fact, just 13 black pitchers to win 20 games in a season (the "Black Aces"), with Dontrelle Willis the most recent inductee in 2005, almost twenty years after Dave Stewart joined the club in 1987 (two years after Gooden). These three, plus one-season wonder Mike Norris in 1980, are the only guys to join this club in the past thirty years.

Now, Thompson’s no favorite to join these Lucky 13, but wouldn’t it be grand if he did? Willis has been such a tremendous flameout, which is not only disappointing for inner-city kids but for anyone who likes to see someone pitch with such exuberance, joy, and crazy, throwback mechanics (even if those same wacky mechanics are part of his struggles today). Daryl Thompson is a more conservative kind of pitcher, one with promise, but not likely to tickle the top of the rotation like Cueto and Volquez no doubt will. He’s got a plus fastball in the mid-90s and a cutter he’s yet to master, and the aforementioned tendency toward gopher balls, not a good asset for someone pitching at Great American.

Still, he’s a great story to follow from a historical perspective, even if he’s throwing in the mighty shadows cast by Edinson and Johnny. He got off to a good start at imtinidating Yankee Stadium—let’s see if he can build on this and give us all someone to root for.