Major League Baseball will attempt to have a mostly customary celebration for Jackie Robinson Day on Tuesday, despite a fast-growing governmental push against promoting diversity.
The league’s on-field plans to celebrate the late Hall of Famer Robinson, the first player to break baseball’s color line, are much the same as the last two-plus decades. Every player will again wear Robinson’s uniform No. 42 in Dodgers blue, regardless of their own team colors, and all team caps will have a special side patch with that number.
A tribute video will be shown in all ballparks and is supplemented by an extensive content push across MLB’s television, digital, and social platforms, again celebrating Robinson’s life and legacy, as well as community events in multiple locales around the country.
Those efforts, however, arrive amid a very different landscape for anything diversity-related since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January. The White House under Trump has aggressively sought to strip anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion from not only public settings but also private businesses and education. That DEI purge even reached the point of briefly scrubbing mention of Robinson’s honorable service in the U.S. Army from the Department of Defense website.
Earlier this year, MLB removed specific references to “diversity” in its careers page—even as it insists that its hiring programs, as well as urban development programs, such as Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, remain intact. While many companies in other industries have fallen in line with Trump’s directive, in some cases to highly damaging financial effect, MLB stands in a particularly delicate position given the widespread fandom existing around the sport.
“Our values on diversity remain unchanged, but another value that is pretty important to us, we always try to comply with what the law is,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said during spring training. “There seems to be an evolution going on here. We’re following that very carefully. When things get a little more settled, we’ll examine each of our programs and make sure that, while the values remain the same, that we’re also consistent with what the law requires.”
