SCORES ANALYSIS COMMENTARY MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020D1
N2 BASEBALL
M.L.B. stays vigilant on the
virus all the way to the end.
3 SOCCER
Mesut Özil angers China,
starting a career tailspin.
6 PRO FOOTBALLBen Roethlisberger’s
Steelers move to 6-0
by edging the Titans,
but they aren’t happy.
Early in his major league career, Cur-
tis Granderson never went hungry
around Dmitri Young, particularly in
Kansas City, Mo.
Whenever the Detroit Tigers traveled
there, Young, one of the elder Black play-
ers on the team, would invite his younger
Black teammates — outfielders Nook
Logan, Marcus Thames, Craig Monroe
and Granderson — to his hotel suite to
enjoy a catered buffet usually made up of
macaroni and cheese, cornbread, collard
greens and barbecued meats. They
would fill their bellies, laugh and talk
about life and baseball for hours.
“We’d all just be hanging out and fight-
ing over the last piece of oxtail,”
Granderson recalled recently. Added
Young, “That good old soul food.”
Without realizing it at the time,
Granderson was participating in an un-
official tradition that has been handed
down through generations in the sport:
The older Black players are responsible
for looking out for the younger ones.
It has often involved gifts or meals, but
those simply provide opportunities to
get together, to offer support and to make
the newbies feel welcome in a sport in
which the presence of African-American
players has shrunk over the past several
decades, to just 8 percent of the major
leagues this season. Just one Black
American player — Mookie Betts of the
Los Angeles Dodgers — is playing in this
year’s World Series.
“Man, that’s ridiculous,” said Young,
47, who last played in the majors in 2008and is now the head baseball coach at
Camarillo High in California. “For the
history of the game, it dwindles down to
this.”
This year complicated the pay-it-for-
ward practice. When the coronavirus
pandemic wiped out the 2020 minor
league season, recently drafted Black
players’ orientation into professional
baseball was put on hold as they missed
out on the camaraderie of a clubhouse.
So Granderson, 39, and the others
leading the Players Alliance, a nonprofit
formed after the killing of George Floyd
that now includes more than 100 former
and current Black players, looked for a
modern way to carry on the tradition.
That is why, not long after the Major
League Baseball amateur draft in June,
Granderson, the president of the non-
profit, was sitting at his computer at his
Chicago home with a notepad and his
cellphone. He researched the list of 160Black Players’ Road to Majors Always Has Guide
By JAMES WAGNERMarcus Thames, right, with Cameron Maybin in 2007. Thames was one of
the players who helped a young Maybin when he was with the Tigers.SUZY ALLMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESA tradition of mentorship
by veterans didn’t stop during
a pandemic. It moved to Zoom.
Continued on Page D2On the sidelines and in the streets, caught in the riptide of race
and reconciliation, Charles Adams prided himself on keeping a
cool optimism.
But on a painful night this spring, as his Minneapolis erupted
in anger and he readied to face protesters in his
riot gear, dread consumed him.
He was a 20-year veteran of the police force, an
African-American officer who tried to effect
change from the inside. He was also the coach of a
state championship football team in a poor, Black neighborhood,
and a steadfast shepherd for his players. As the sky darkened,
he feared for them. Where were they? Were they safe?
He feared for himself. His uniform made him a target. The face
shield and gas mask hid his identity from the angry crowds,
obscuring the beloved figure he has been across large swaths of
the city.Above, Charles
Adams, coach of
Minneapolis North,
and his players
after a home-open-
ing win on Oct. 16.
Adams, also until
recently a police
officer, recruited
members of the
force, including
Ricky Plunkett, left,
as assistants.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM GRUBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES‘Just Know That I Care’
A wrenching double duty in the city
where George Floyd was killed.
KURT
STREETER
SPORTS
OF THE TIMESContinued on Page D4.