Young, Gifted and Black

There was an article in this past weeks Sports Illustrated that featured David Price. Here is just a very small portion of it, for the rest of the article go here.

IN JANUARY 2005, during his freshman year at Vanderbilt, David Price decided to drop out of school, quit baseball and work at McDonald's. He picked his preferred location, near his home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. He told his father, Bonnie, about his plan. Then he informed Vandy coach Tim Corbin of his intention in a tearful meeting in the Commodores' locker room. Sure, Price was a 6'6" lefthanded pitcher who could throw upward of 90 miles per hour and seven months earlier had been drafted in the 19th round by the Los Angeles Dodgers. But he had also just been shelled in a preseason intrasquad game, clearly a call to the Golden Arches. "It was definitely kind of out there," Corbin recalls, "but I couldn't laugh because he was so serious." ¶ Baseball has lost countless African-American athletes to basketball and the lure of the McDonald's All-American team, but not necessarily to McDonald's itself. Corbin needed an hour to convince Price that his future was in fastballs, not fast food. "He had to survive that moment to show he could survive as a pitcher," Corbin says. It was a crucial step, not only for Price but also for baseball in the black community. Today Price is the best African-American pitching prospect since Dwight Gooden, in an organization that has built around African-American players like no other current franchise.