First is the weird tradition of A's players wearing white shoes. One of the weirdest dress requirements (I assume) in baseball. Combined with their home whites, they obviously appear to be "very white" on the field.
Second is the fact that the longer I thought about it, the A's really do have a lot of white players. In fact, here are the only black/foreign players on the A's:
Kiko Calero, Santiago Casilla, Esteban Loaiza, Marco Scutaro, Milton Bradley, and Shannon Stewart.
That's 6 non-white players on the 25 man roster (and since Loaiza is on the DL, only 5 are currently active). So we'll call that 20%. Even this guy is an American-born citizen!
Now obviously I don't know which players have which amount of what ethnicities in them - so these 5 are the only players born outside of the USA. So I should probably say the A's are 20% foreign, not "non-white". But to make my point easier, let's just go ahead and say the A's are 80% white.
So it turns out my dad was right. What made this such a glaring point at the time (in addition to the white uniforms), was that the A's were in the field at the time, and of the 6 players listed, 3 are pitchers, and Milton Bradley wasn't playing. So with the exception of Marco Scutaro and Shannon Stewart, the A's really were all white.
Now, I'm not accusing the A's of being a racist organization - they probably have the most clear set of guidelines out of any Major League team as to exactly what they look for in players (see "Moneyball"). But this raises a lot of interesting questions. Are young black players not as patient at the plate as white guys? (Gary Sheffield would probably agree). The A's are very good at finding undervalued talent, so are more white players undervalued? Whatever it is, it seems the "Moneyball" approach seems to attract more white guys than a Republican debate. Funny, considering the A's logo is an elephant.
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