By John Klima

The first pitch C.C. Sabathia threw last season means even more now. One monologue and 19 victories later, the 26-year old imposed a small bit of history and reminded baseball of why it is sometimes a modern game mired in ancient complexities and insecurities.

Sabathia became the first black pitcher in 22 years to win the Cy Young Award when he earned the American League’s honor for his 19-7, 209 strikeouts and 241 innings pitched season. He became the first black pitcher to win the Cy Young Award since Dwight Gooden in 1985 and only the sixth black pitcher in 51 years to win baseball’s highest pitching honor.

He became the first black American League pitcher to win the Cy Young since Vida Blue in 1971. This news was pushed aside because of indictments and free agents, but shouldn’t have to give up its seat, even though it will.

A month into the season, I spent 20 minutes with Sabathia in the dugout at Angel Stadium. We didn’t talk pitching, but about the place of black players in baseball. It is now appropriate that his first meaningful comments of the season are as fitting as his final award.

He still seemed shocked that his initial comments about the declining number of black players in baseball, to say nothing of the nearly non-existent numbers of blacks in the game-running positions of pitcher and catcher, were received as warmly as they were.

“I stood there for half an hour explaining myself,” he said. “The guy told me it was going to run nationally. I said, ‘Thank you. Please run it nationally.’ It needs to be out there.”

Sabathia didn’t know he would have a career year, nor did he recognize that he had a platform.

“People don’t see what (black players) see,” Sabathia said. “I used the word crisis, but that’s what it is. Nobody was paying attention to it. What will it be in 15 years if we don’t address it? A few years ago, I never thought I’d be the only African-American in my clubhouse, but it happened.”

This is a question baseball buries deep in its collective self, brushed aside under piles of money and drug inquisitions. But like Sabathia, it is there, as large and as imposing as ever.

History proves that Sabathia has defied odds. Football and basketball develops and rewards athleticism, but baseball requires skills. Motor skills – mechanics – take longer to develop than athleticism. It is harder to throw a fastball for a strike than it is to dunk a basketball. It is harder to hit a 90-mile per hour slider, one like Sabathia might throw, than it is to memorize a playbook and run a route. Of course, you can always argue that blacks don’t want to play baseball. But you can also argue that baseball doesn’t want to play black kids. The reason is as a difficult to find as a black Cy Young Award winner.

After Jackie Robinson, an unwritten quota system was in effect, in which clubs generally took only the black player they wanted the most and hired another player to be his companion. Baseball has never undergone a true integration. It has only sufficed with the forced few. When the game has a handful of stunningly talented young black position players as it does now, such as B.J. and Justin Upton, this becomes overlooked.

But the traces of the quota system remain, and all you have to do is look at pitchers. Delmon Young possessed a power bat and a power arm in high school, but there was never a question that he would be drafted as a hitter. The Dodgers bucked the trend with Edwin Jackson, signing the amateur outfielder with the intent of making him a pitcher. As Jackson labors into his 20s, blessed with a loose and whippy power arm from which no concept of control emanates, he is as much the exception to the rule as is left-hander David Price, the black pitcher from Vanderbilt the Devil Rays choose first overall in last June’s First Year Player Draft.

Deep inside the hallways of front offices across baseball, scouts and player development people want nothing to do with black players unless they can be hurried to the Majors. If you draft a black player, he better be close, and if he’s black, he better not be a pitcher.

There was once a black three-sport star from Baldwin Park High, J.J. Davis, who became the 8th overall pick in the 1997 draft.

A scout recalled a story of his scouting director threatening him by saying, “If you turn him in as a pitcher, I’ll (expletive) fire you.”

And so the game marches on.

“Sometimes you gotta break the mold,” one scout said. “Even if you’re a team that drafts a closer to finished product, sometimes you gotta throw that young athlete in there and see what happens.”

But that doesn’t always work. Another scout still ruefully recalls how he couldn’t convince his team to give him $5,000 to sign outfielder Coco Crisp at Pierce College. Still another young black player, outfielder Brandon Watson from Westchester High, has 3,500 career minor league at-bats, had a 43-game hitting streak at Triple-A in 2007, and still can’t buy a break.

The scout who wishes teams would break the mold remembers seeing DeSean Jackson play baseball at Long Beach Poly before he became an NFL prospect as a wide receiver at Cal.

“He was hitting home runs with wood at Blair Field as a junior,” the scout said. “He never threw in a game, but if you caught him playing long toss you saw a plus arm. He could have been a pitcher or an outfielder. But if the kid doesn’t want to play, you can’t sell that kid to your team.”

And therein is the dilemma, one that Sabathia, 26, knows exists. He follows in the footsteps of the rare group of black pitchers to win the Cy Young Award: Don Newcombe (1956), Bob Gibson (1968 and 1970), Blue (1971), Ferguson Jenkins (1971) and Gooden (1985). He is very much like Gibson in his awareness of the world around him, but unlike any of these other pitchers, his warmth welcomes fans of all races.

Sabathia may not realize this yet, but he has the potential to be a historically significant black pitcher because he does not display the self-destructive tendencies that short-changed the careers of Newcombe, Blue and Gooden. Baseball people do love their shining examples of why a player wasn’t worth it, but Sabathia, a self-described family man committed to his former Little League, has the chance to become the opposite example. And that alone is worth gold.

“The high-round players get more slack, period,” the former first-round pick said. “Whether a black kid gets drafted in the first round vs. a white kid in the first round, I mean, he’s gonna get a chance to screw up a few times and they’re gonna stick with him. Maybe it won’t be as long as it is for a white kid.”

It is stunning that the game that acknowledges black pitcher Satchel Paige as one of its greats generally rues developing black pitchers. The best way to beat it hasn’t changed the since the days of Robinson or Paige. The best way to prove it is by performance, the only true metric to show baseball what the game is missing.