COMPTON -- All Lyndon Poole was looking for was a chance. He spent two junior college years on the bench, wasn’t drafted, but was convinced that he was better than coaches and scouts were giving him credit for. A thoughtful and analytical person, Poole couldn’t piece together why things weren’t adding up for him. Frustrated, he got in his car and drove to Compton.

The black 19-year-old outfielder showed up on the doorstep of Major League Baseball’s Urban Academy last spring. He introduced himself to Darrell Miller, the Academy’s director, and Miller sent him to play on the Academy’s top scout team. Poole’s speed caught Miller’s eye. He decided there was enough hitting potential to warrant a minor league contract. It bothered Miller that Poole had never been given a chance to succeed or fail. His old scouting instincts kicked in. Did he know if the kid will play in the big leagues? No. Was he worth taking a chance on? Yes.

Poole performed as Miller believed he could. After two years of getting nowhere, it took Poole a month to become the first player signed to a professional contract from the Academy. He played so well in a Fourth of July tournament that when the Dodgers needed an outfielder in the Gulf Coast League, they gave him a $5,000 bonus and money for college tuition that he is using. For Poole, it was never about the money, but about the opportunity he felt he never received as an amateur player.

As baseball celebrates the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s arrival, we should not overlook the efforts involved in baseball’s latest re-integration movement. Just as when Robinson broke in, this cause also is largely overlooked, but the significance of opportunity was not lost on Poole.

“This was the first time I was getting exposure in my baseball career,” Poole said. “I felt like somebody had my back this time. I was actually being promoted to people who have a lot of influence in the game. Honestly, the Academy was heaven sent for me. I felt like I was at the right place at the right time every time I showed up here.”

After the season, Poole became a full-time instructor at the Academy and continued his college education before leaving for spring training this month. The Academy has just passed its first anniversary, and these are the years that will require the most patience. The superstar will not come overnight. But the road to the breakthrough will be dotted with small victories like Poole, who might be only pursing his real estate license instead of playing professionally. Miller is proud, but in a private moment in his office, the worry he hides from the world becomes more evident. Much is at stake with this experiment, and though it is taking place far away from the bright lights of the big leagues, he hopes that, one day, the work done here will become a landmark of the game.

But he never anticipated the social work that accompanies this baseball job. He learned that academic education has an even higher value that he thought it would. Baseball instruction also can’t be limited to drills and repetition. Kids want games, so Miller formed two levels of play, which added to the hours and stress on the small staff. As with any good experiment, new lessons are observed everyday. Yet he has already learned the most difficult lesson: you can’t save them all.

“That’s probably the hardest thing,” Miller said. “I came into this thing pie-in-the-sky. That’s my personality anyway. I see the good in everything and I try for the best in everything. But the reality is you can only do so much. You can only give so many opportunities. You can’t make a kid want it. But it’s also – and this is the balance – it’s also very easy to go, ‘Whoever comes, comes. If they don’t want to come, screw ‘em, or whatever.’ I really like the challenge of making sure that these guys are over-invited, they’re over-welcomed. This is the hard part.”

He was stunned at how naïve most black kids from the inner-city are about baseball. Poole was an exception. He played at J.W. North in Riverside and Palomar College. He had a baseball intellect. Miller and his staff have learned to take each kid on a case-by-case basis. “You can have two 12-year old kids,” Miller explained, “And one can play like he’s 12 and the other can play like he’s six.”

Miller wasn’t a star, but he did catch professionally for 12 years and found his way into 224 big league games. Yet there have been times when he’s showed a kid how to hold a bat, how to field a ground ball, how to throw. Remedial instruction is a way of life. All teachers must check their egos at the door. Persistence can only be found in patience.

“If I just say it one more time, maybe they’ll hear me this time,” he said. “You’re hoping this one time, you’ll hear me. So you never give up on him. You’re hoping. Or when the guy gets kicked out of school for the third time, you’re going ‘Man, you can make some money, you can be a first-round draft pick.’ Then he gets kicked out of school again and you say, ‘How’s he ever going to learn?’ So that’s the hard thing. You’re almost like a parent here. How do you tough love? When do you intervene? How long can you keep calling a kid a prospect? I’m spending too many sleepless nights worrying about this kid or that situation. Or why did that happen or how can I change this? Was there a way I could have done this I didn’t think of? I gotta sleep, too, or else I’m gonna kill myself.”

This Academy experiment – Jimmie Lee Solomon’s project – is about more than helping black kids find their way into professional baseball. It’s about fighting silent obstacles. It’s about fighting the safe bet syndrome. There are code words that exist within the scouting and player development communities. ‘Athleticism’ is often associated with black position players, yet because they have often played less amateur baseball and are not as experienced as their carbon copy college player counterparts, the term ‘raw’ comes into play. ‘Raw’ is a negative term if you’re a black ballplayer, a connotation that means there’s more chance of failure than success. Poole was deemed to be too raw. Yet if a player happens to be a raw Dominican, well, then he just might be the next Miguel Tejada. His odds of success are viewed differently than his black colleague. There is a division of philosophy deep within the game.

The Commissioner’s office can only do so much, and here’s why: no matter what power they have, they do not have the muscle to tell 30 club owners what to do and how to do it. Nor do owners have any mandate to obey them. Major League Baseball cannot dictate organizational philosophies no matter how they control certain cash streams. They cannot flip a switch and change a century of stagnant thought. The Gentlemen’s Agreement is supposed to be a thing of the past, but look at the numbers – a record-low nine percent of black players in the majors in 2006 -- and it’s hard to wonder if some clubs have made a decision that developing black players is to the detriment of the game. If so, there’s nothing MLB can do to stand in the way of a backroom deal, except for what Solomon and Miller are doing now – starting, bit by bit, player by player, to put the dollar sign back on the black ballplayer, and build Academies from one end of the country to another.

Miller knows there are years more work to be done in Los Angeles. He wants to build relationships with cities beyond Compton, into Inglewood, and places like Gardena and Carson, which used to produce players. He is cautiously optimistic that a group of about a dozen first-and-second graders might become a “dynamic” crop of players in six years. Talk about patience.

You can’t save them all, but Miller is proud that the Academy saved Poole, the first example of what went right. Hopefully, there will be many others like him, and in the process, Miller will save himself from those moments of doubt and worry that await him everyday he unlocks the gates of the baseball laboratory.