Who's in Charge?  Demographics of MLB Managers from 1991-2016  

When a sport is nearly universally run by a single race of people, it is unlikely that sport will have equality among the races in other areas.  Leadership of MLB teams from 1996-2016 was universally White aside from a blip in 2004 where a single Black leader spent a year atop an MLB franchise.  This lack of upper-level minority leadership means that very few middle managers will be hired that do not resemble the leadership team.  This makes it far more likely that any manager hired will be White.  With most managers being White, players who are White will generally receive more opportunities for the same reason why they got their opportunity to manage in the first place.  

The racial disparity permeates the game of baseball at every level, and at the college level it is both obvious and measurable.  In 2017, more than 92 percent of head coaches and assistant coaches outside the HBCU ranks in Division I were white. And the minority coaches that are in D-I tended to be employed by schools outside the Power Five conferences. There were four minority head coaches among the 61 Power Five schools and only one - Northwestern's Spencer Allen - was black.   That disparity obviously impacts recruiting, and pushes those kids from inner cities further away from opportunities because the coaches will generally scout what they know.  It's highly unlikely to see a college coach from a rural mostly-white town heading into the heart of the inner city to do his recruiting so the problem expands at the college level.  The chances of a kid from a low-income background diminish with each level, and then simple geography gets in the way.  This in turn feeds the lack of managers at the higher levels because with fewer players comes fewer who break into coaching.  Until leadership of baseball clubs looks different, it is unlikely that we will see any significant changes to the demographics of baseball players here in America.