Racial Quotas in Baseball

Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition is pressuring the Atlanta Braves baseball team to hire more black players. Blogger Daniel Drezner believes that pushing for quotas in baseball is so silly that "Rainbow/PUSH is run by idiots."

I oppose affirmative action and racial quotas. But I don't see why it's any worse to have affirmative action in baseball than anywhere else.

Some might argue that the case against affirmative action in baseball is very strong because the performance of baseball players can be objectively measured. But the ultimate goal of a player is to bring in fans, not win games. It's very possible that if a team has no members of a racial group, it will lose fans from this group. A team, therefore, might be financially better off if it hires a slightly lower quality player of an otherwise excluded race than it would be if it hired all the best baseball players it could.

And more importantly, affirmative action tends to lower the quality of organizations. Since sports fans care mostly about the relative performance of teams, they would not be hurt if affirmative action slightly lowered the quality of all teams. In contrast, in most other industries consumers' welfare is determined by absolute performances. Thus, if affirmative action, for example, slightly lowered the quality of all hospitals then all patients would suffer. So while I dislike affirmative action, I would much rather see it in sports than almost anywhere else.