HBCU Swingman Classic attracts players, broadcasters, fans to Texas

ARLINGTON, Texas — One of the funnier ironies in baseball is the term Texas Leaguer. It refers to a weak bloop single, the exact opposite of the phrase “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Over the course of MLB’s All-Star week festivities, the latter phrase turned out to be prescient, from the crowds at the second annual HBCU Swingman Classic, to the soaring temperatures and the storms that robbed us of what many hoped we’d get to see on a big league field: the battle of the bands.

Following last year’s debut of the game that features players from Black schools and was a rousing success in Seattle of all places, there was a real question as to whether bigger would equal better, just because.

When 16,467 fans showed up at Globe Life Field to support the teams, the answer was clear.

The entire weekend featured all the usual trappings of the Commissioner’s Cup and Jennie Finch Classic, in which high-level teams from MLB academies nationwide play each other in a tournament. The Thursday before the game, the Urban Youth Academy was teeming with ballplayers and coaches and Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. was there holding court. Everywhere you turned, one of ours was either helping or being helped, in a baseball sense.

One man remembers when he was the only one in the building.

“Coming out here to Dallas and starting from scratch where, you know, there’s nobody in the building and you’re having every kid you could think of to come out and you’re still only maybe having 30 kids,” Juan Garciga, senior director of the Youth Academy & Baseball Development for the Texas Rangers, said Friday.

Since 2018, the facility and program have gotten to the point where they now hold college signing ceremonies at the big league park for their players who make it to the next level. Some academies that have been around longer have had guys drafted out of high school, but for Garciga the process is still one that bears fruit, even if his kids aren’t all going to big-time Division I programs.

“In 2020, we had our first athlete who signed to go play college baseball. And he reached out to say, ‘Hey, can I do my signing at the academy?’ And so we did it here at the academy. He just felt like this was home — not a knock at his high school,” the Miami native, who used to work in the Miami Marlins front office, explained. “I think he just felt like the people that really helped him get to that point were academy staff members. We had some media come by and tried to make it a big deal because it was our first athlete, and you know, those kids that started with us in 2018. By the time they graduated, that number grew exponentially. It was just so cool to kind of be a part of their journey from when they’re 13, 14 years old, all the way to see it through.”

Opportunities to play, never mind grow, progress and potentially get seen are so scarce in this game for non-white American kids. With college kids practicing in front of the high schoolers, there’s a very real effect of being able to visualize a goal in reality, not just in theory. You too could get to college from the academy. And you too could get to play on a big league field in college.

“I think it’s important for any kid to have some exposure. I was also fortunate to have a dad that played, so I didn’t have to fight, claw and scratch to be seen,” Griffey said. “For some of these kids, we want them to live their dreams. Twenty years from now, we want them to be doing these interviews.”

Hanging out with Griffey, the Swingman himself, is the experience of a lifetime for the college guys and seeing is believing for many youths when we’re talking about establishing goals. As for Garciga’s academy, which lost the 2023 Commissioner’s Cup championship game in Seattle, this time round they made sure they got it done against the Cincinnati Reds Youth Academy, winning 14-0. Three of the kids on the 17U squad were on a 12U team that traveled to the 2019 Andre Dawson Classic in New Orleans, a tournament formerly known as the Urban Invitational that is an annual, round-robin collegiate baseball tournament designed by MLB to highlight historically Black colleges and universities and their baseball programs.

“Initially, we started working with the high school district that’s in this area, just because this is the primary community we’re trying to serve. So West Dallas and the Dallas Independent School District, but we don’t put any caps or restrictions on any of our training. So if there’s kids from other parts of DFW that want to participate and see value in the program, they’re allowed to. It just grew a lot through word of mouth, you know? You have players start to get better. And parents are like, ‘Oh, where’s he been going? Like, we see a difference,’ ” Garciga said. “Where we saw the biggest change was, first you hear something’s free, you wonder how good can it be. You have some players that are kind of middle-tier or higher-tier players who thought this was exclusively for kids who don’t own baseball gloves and don’t know how to play. We kind of flipped the script on them when they started seeing a little bit success and some of the unique opportunities those higher-level players got to do because we want to be all things to all people. We want to meet the kids where they’re at.”

A reminder: The goal for all of these efforts isn’t just turning out more players to feed the player pool beast. Dreams are fun, dreams are achievable, but dreams can fade. So, tangible options are still necessary.

“The goal is to get more kids to work in baseball,” Griffey said plainly at Oates Field at the complex. “A lot of kids are not going to be drafted, but you can still be in the sport that you love. I mean, there are plenty of jobs in Major League Baseball that you can do.”

Great moments in sports have several calling cards. The location, the uniforms, the players, the plays and, often, the broadcasts make up such an integral part of the experience. The broadcasts are often reserved for former players or, in many cases, a nepotistic role. That is, if your dad did it, you can do it too.

Calling games is no small skill. It’s not just talking junk with your buddies. The presentation of sports is as important to many as the competition itself and who does it affects how the public absorbs what they’re looking at. Core memories are made as a result of the voices we hear, and the faces we see make up so much of what we consider important.

This year, the MLB Voices program officially got underway, which the league office “aims to develop and grow the next generation of play-by-play talent in baseball.” The four young men who are part of the program were eager and ready to learn and shadowed some of the best broadcasters around, Seattle Mariners play-by-play broadcaster Dave Sims and MLB Network analyst Harold Reynolds.

Most fascinatingly, most of them didn’t even play that much growing up. But their love of the game is still ever apparent and palpable.

“I didn’t grow up playing baseball, and my family actually was not a baseball family,” Grayson Singleton, a 2023 Oklahoma State grad, said Friday. “I actually grew to love baseball by myself, you know, figured out like the intricacies of the sport and whatnot. I’m like, ‘Wait, is this actually interesting?’ So now it’s grown from something that was, ‘oh, here’s the only sport in summer’ to ‘I actually like watching baseball.’ I love it.”

He works in Norman, Oklahoma, covering the Oklahoma Sooners, and handles play-by-play duties in Oklahoma City for high school sports. Over the course of the weekend, the four participants bonded over their love of storytelling in sports.

Sedric Granger is an Ohio University graduate who’s an assistant sports information coordinator at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and is the lead for baseball. He built connections at the National Association of Black Journalists to get to this point and credits much of his love of the game to an obvious group: his friends.

“Me being from Columbus, Ohio, the big Steam over there, as you have Ohio State Buckeyes, and it’s mainly all about football and basketball, baseball wasn’t really the main sport that would be even on TV over there,” Granger noted, with a short ’fro that looks like second coming of soul singer Sam Cooke. “So I just really didn’t grow up too much around the game aside from the Columbus Clippers. I’d go to the Columbus Clippers games, Dime-A-Dog Night and do those every once in a while, but I definitely wasn’t big into it. But I give a lot of credit to two of my best friends. Derek and Gabe are their names and they are big baseball guys. They played baseball in high school, and they have an absolute infectious love for the game and I hang out with them and watch a lot of sports.”

The fact that basic camaraderie can fuel a passion is something that we tend to forget. Ambition and skill are not qualities spun out of thin air. It takes real people doing real things to foster growth, which is what the MLB Voices program is all about.

“Our group is really here as a shadow opportunity to network with some of the, you know, top-ranking officials in MLB. But also to understand what this experience means, not only from an HBCU perspective, but kind of from a holistic perspective,” Cam Thomas, a 2022 Missouri grad and event producer, explained. He’s a guy who is as polished as it gets at a young age and understands the opportunity that All-Star week has provided him.

“When you think about Ken Griffey Jr. and think about Harold Reynolds, and Dave Sims — the guys that are really the faces of this program kind of nationally — but think about where they were 20-25 years ago and think about where we are right now. It would be crazy to think that this group of mid-20-year-olds would have done this in the ’80s, or the ’70s.”

Fellowship and education are quality paths to success, even if brilliance isn’t required right out of the gate. Everyone wants to be an expert at everything, and consumers act like perfection is the only goal or even starting point. Half the battle toward getting there is recognizing that the smartest people on earth know that they don’t know everything, a mantra that these four are taking to heart as they learn.

“It’s not easy being comfortable with the fact that you don’t know everything, and seeking advice and knowledge from people who do know more than you,” Reginald Singleton Jr., a Howard University graduate from the class of 2023, said. He majored in television and film and minored in business administration. He’s from Louisiana, where there is no big league team, and has been a part of the New Orleans Youth Academy’s broadcast program.

“Baseball is a different rhythm for football, which is a different rhythm for basketball, in hockey, and golf and tennis. It’s a different rhythm that you have to learn and also realizing the dynamic between media and athlete. At the end of the day, what athletes want is for the media to be is fair. They don’t want necessarily for the media to take potshots at athletes or dog athletes. And if you’re fair, and you lay out the facts, that I think that’s when the relationship begins, and it can only improve from there.”

Sounds like a great foundational start to me.

In an athlete’s mind, every day is game day. On this day, game day, turned out to be rain day. As a result of hurricane conditions in Houston, Prairie View A&M’s band could not make the proceedings. It was an unfortunate twist to the day, spoiling the brainchild of Baseball Hall of Famer Andre Dawson, a Florida A&M alum, but not ruining the night.

There was still plenty of fun to be had and with the function being in Texas, not Washington state, the entire vibe was different. The inaugural event was almost like an awakening in terms of the Seattle community showing up for each other in a way that hadn’t been made available to them before.

Dallas did it differently. Besides the greater number of people, the purpose was more specific and honed. Most people there had a personal reason to show up, not just a collective one. While certainly two different geographic locations, Texas is also far closer physically to many HBCUs and thus the general buy-in to the experience has far more people ready and willing to show up and show out. Colors of Greek-letter organizations were the norm, not the exception. And even though it took a while to get cranking, by the end of the night the jumbotron had reached peak Black activity, which is what we love.

There were things you just couldn’t make up. A great-grandson of the late Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, a legendary Negro Leaguer, was a starter in the game. A Japanese player who transferred from Middle Tennessee State to North Carolina A&T took the field, too. The cultural outreach of the game and event had a different footprint from the previous year, an excellent step when considering that this game will be held in Atlanta in 2025. ATL, shawty.

“It’s really cool like coming to an all-Black oriented event here. It feels like home. The music and the vibes are catered to us. It’s cool, you feel relaxed,” Courtney Blanchard, 35, said. Her friend has a son who plays Little League and said why not go to the game, along with her crew. She’s been to a couple of minor league games in Frisco, but that’s about it. “It’s also nice to kind of see us on a big field, you know? Predominantly. I don’t get to a lot of baseball games. It’s nice to come to something that’s affordable.”

Just having a good time with her homegirl at a ballpark. What a concept.

Others were there to basically rep the set.

“She wanted to come out and support the HBCUs. Yeah, all the young men, she’s not even a baseball fan,” Gary Courtney said, referring to his wife Elizabeth, who was wearing a Tuskegee University T-shirt. They heard about the function through the Kappa League, an outreach program of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Their son participates in the program. Their older son is a Tuskegee student. They moved to Texas from Minnesota a few years back.

“Unfortunately, most HBCUs are severely underfunded. So there’s been some challenges as it relates to that with our son’s experience in Tuskegee,” Gary Courtney said. “But overall, it’s been good. It’s been positive exposure in terms of the historical perspective of the university, and supporting our community has been really enriching and great.”

The life lessons are as important as the ones in the classroom.

“Our son, he loves it. He loves the people. He loves the friendships he’s developed. So I think it’s been really good for him personally and professionally stepping into it himself as a young man,” Elizabeth Courtney said. “Our younger son, we’re trying to guide him in that direction, hopefully somewhere here in Texas. But HBCU for sure.”

In the end, the American League beat the National League 5-4, capping off a successful run for the MLB-MLBPA Youth Development Foundation event. My favorite person there was Tatsunori Negishi, the N.C. A&T player. Just taking in the moment after the game, he used the time to explain what his journeys in the U.S. have meant to him.

“I like it. It’s a little bit different from what I’ve experience before,” he said. “I took my time to adjust and I like my teammates and my coaches. I just made so many friends, throughout different cultures and values. Not everyone can do this. It’s big for me.

“I don’t do fried chicken. But I love mac and cheese. I eat it with steak.”

On a muggy night outside of Dallas, as the kids say, everybody ate.