Q&A Teddy and Mack - African-American Metsies

Mack: Very interesting thoughs on the Latin players, but I'm also overly concerned with the lack of African-Americans. Omar Minaya seems to reach out here a few years when he drafted three first team members of the All-Black School All-Americans (Emary Frederick, Richard Lucas, and I think Robert Carson). Were the black players treated with the same second citizen status as the whites?

Teddy:

I think the guys you mention were actually BJ Hubbert out of Alcorn State, Joaquin Rodriguez out of Jackson State, and either Darren Clark or Emary Frederick from Southern (Roy Merrit maybe?). Lucas and Carson were both high school draft picks so they wouldn't have been Black College All-Americans, though both of them, and the 5 previously mentioned could all have been All-Americans in my book because they were all phenomenally talented.

I really don't have any perspective on your next question, and to be honest, I think the shortage of African-American talent is more of an issue with professional baseball than it is with the Mets organization. Lamar Johnson and Tom McCraw are two of the best hitting coaches they have in their system, and Kevin Morgan still maintains a front office position so its not like the Mets aren't hiring African Americans.

I'm not privvy to the actual statistics across major league baseball, but I can only assume that the Mets numbers are in line with the rest of baseball in terms of its number of African American personnel. They even reached out to Ghana in 2007 as part of some type of goodwill program to spread the game of baseball and we had two players from the country come work out with us for a couple weeks. I think they really enjoyed the experience and I was impressed with the Mets for following through with it

Every one of the African American ballplayers I played with in the Mets system had incredible talent and was given an opportunity to play so I don't think their is anything to really delve deeper on. I'm curious to see where Zo Harris will fit in this system, but they should probably keep him on the 40-man just to pinch run just like Brett Gardner did for the Yanks in the playoffs...Zo can absolutely fly. I'm really pulling for Merrit and Frederick to get an extended look as LOOGY/Right Handed Specialists. They're cheap and they're effective when used the right way and I'd love to see them get a chance to stick in the show. I was also really impressed with Richard Lucas. He's a couple years away, but the ball jumps off his bat, and he has the look of a big league ballplayer. I hope the stars align for him and he continues to progress