Lies, Damn Lies and... ?

I assume that Jackie Robinson Day in major league baseball was meant to commemorate an important and too often forgotten event in our nation's history.

Predictably, it hasn't worked; it's just given more grist to the melodramatic ESPN Morality Brigade, who have taken the obvious way out ("Why don't more black people play baseball?") rather than grapple with something that would require thoughtful consideration ("Why has the integration of Hispanic and Asian players been so much easier? And what does it mean that there are an increasing number of Hispanic managers and GMs, but at the same time Ozzie Guillen keeps calling people fags and gets away with it essentially because he's a Latino and pretends to not understand English?").

Gene Wojiechowski is not the man to ask those questions, both because he spends most of his free time bitching about how basketball players don't practice enough and because he's a jackass. So here are some interesting numbers:

Sport / Black Representation, by %
Life (ie, US population) ~12
Baseball ~8
Basketball ~80
Football ~65

And a question: why is it a worse sign for US race relations that African Americans are down 4% in baseball than it is that they're up over 60% in the other two major sports?