Their work is long overdue.

Close on 60 years after Jackie Robinson first broke baseball's colour barrier, the Houston Astros took the field for the 2005 World Series without a single AfricanAmerican on their 25-man roster. Five other teams were also able to boast no black representatives by the end of last season as America's pastime has begun to look less and less like America.

In an era when 80 per cent of the NBA and two out of every three NFL players are African-American, baseball has seen its minority membership gradually shrink over the past three decades. From a situation in 1975 when one in four players were black, the statistic is now less than one in 10 and falling. The situation has reached such crisis proportions that there isn't one single black player from Philadelphia, New York City or Boston currently playing at the top level of the game. More than one pundit has posited the theory that baseball now ranks fourth in black households, overtaken by golf via the Tiger Woods factor.

"I've been actively trying to figure out what the hell is going on for a number of years, " said Darrell Miller, a former player and scout who directs the Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy, which opened in Compton, Los Angeles last February. "If there's any fault we all share it. We were all kind of asleep, and we finally woke up and said, 'Oh, crap! What happened?' The numbers hit you in the face. We see the Astros in the World Series last year and wonder how that could have happened. I think for a time the mentality was, 'It's just a fad. It's a Michael Jordan thing. It's going to blow over. We're America's game.' But it's clearly not that simple, and it's hard to grasp how we let it get this way."

The reasons are manifold, ranging from cost of equipment to fashion sense.

Baseball fields are expensive to build and to maintain. For an urban community without much money to spend, it's far easier to tarmacadam a couple of basketball courts and to set up some hoops. Moreover, the kids just need a single ball to make the most of that facility. By contrast, a baseball diamond requires a large green area, fencing, and constant care and attention. With the price of bats, balls, helmets and gloves factored in, communities and parents will usually push the cheaper, easier alternative and it's no coincidence the number of black baseball Major Leaguers fell by half during the 90s.

There are also huge ancillary costs in baseball that militate against progress through the ranks. While a kid can perfect his jump shot by repeating it a million times alone with the hoop, learning to hit the baseball properly requires coaching. All over white suburbia, former pros teach children the art of hitting and pitching for $60 a lesson. When these players come up against AfricanAmericans in their teen years, they are more advanced and more likely to catch the eye of scouts. Inevitably, kids will gravitate towards the games they think they can be best at leading to a further fall-off in numbers as more stick with basketball and gridiron.

Even if a black teenager is talented enough, he faces another huge obstacle. In the same way that prior to being forced to pay back the schoolboy clubs who developed them, English outfits used to trawl Ireland for footballers, signing many in the hope of unearthing the really talented few, American baseball teams today invest their scouting resources in Latin American countries like the Dominican Republic. There, they can pick up the signature of a gifted youngster for $5,000. Given that snapping up an American kid of any colour requires a much heftier signing-on bonus, it's easy to understand why the percentage of Latin-Americans in the game is at 30 per cent and rising.

It's not just a matter of economics either. For a generation with famously short attention spans, the NBA is just far sexier than baseball. It's a flashier game . . . think the contrast between cricket and the Premiership . . . and is also neatly tied up with the rap world. Rappers reference it in their songs, wear the jerseys of their favourite teams on stage and in the case of Jay-Z even own a large share of the New Jersey Nets. It helped too that after Jordan departed the scene, a fresh new star emerged in wunderkind LeBron James.

While the NFL is also littered with black icons like Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, baseball's most famous African-American remains the troubled figure of Bonds. With Bonds battling his own demons, others have stepped to the plate. Several of his black peers have recently established foundations to build facilities, provide coaching and to try to lure a new generation to the sport.

"Our goal is to increase the opportunities for America's youth to enjoy the game of baseball in inner cities and beyond, " says Minnesota Twins' outfielder Torii Hunter in the mission statement of his own project, "and to provide an equal playing field for everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity and skill level."

An equal playing field. Something to aspire to in the build-up to the 60th anniversary of Robinson's debut next spring.