COLUMN ONE : In Minors, It’s Lonely at the Top : Few women and minorities get a chance at management on America’s small-town baseball circuit. Those who do find old ways die hard.

It’s Saturday evening at Knights Castle, where a warm breeze curving through the oaks beyond center field carries the distinct scent of Americana.

A little girl is sprinting and squealing around the grassy diamond with a fuzzy green dragon named Homer. A Top 40 song echoes off the outfield fence.

The players from the Charlotte Knights and Richmond Braves take the field for the sixth inning as another stitch is inserted into the rich part of America’s social fabric known as minor-league baseball.

Pete Moore watches from the top of Section 108. Arms folded. Face tight.

As general manager of the Knights, he is responsible for everything from the lemonade to the scoreboard quiz to that silly spiked-tail Homer.

Moore should be a major part of this fabric. But he isn’t.

He is black and, in this culture, he is alone.

Moore is the only general manager of color in the minors. Among its 156 National Assn.-sponsored teams from Albuquerque to Yakima, there also are just eight women general managers.

Despite rising diversification of management in the three major-league sports, minor-league baseball’s executive suites seem to be located in a world that sensitivity forgot.

The owners--mostly small businessmen working out of small towns--cannot choose who plays for, manages or coaches their teams. Those decisions are made by the major-league affiliates--and they have tried to diversify the minor-league dugouts as they have the majors’.

But owners can decide who supervises the selling and presentation of their product to an audience that surpassed 30 million fans last year.

Ninety-five percent of the time, that person is a white man.

Some owners are trying to improve the numbers.

But others claim minority candidates are not interested in the grunt work of the minors or are lured away by more attractive corporate positions.

“Most people who succeed in the minor leagues start out as lowly interns or sales representatives making $12,000 to $15,000 a year through hard work,” said Larry Schmittou, longtime owner of the Triple-A Nashville franchise. “I’m not saying [blacks] aren’t agreeable to doing that, but I don’t know,” said Schmittou, whose 11-person staff includes two women and no minorities.

Critics say such claims reflect attitudes that not only keep minorities and women from getting ahead in cloistered business worlds such as this, but discourage them from even trying to break in.

In the case of the minors, that means many may lose access to sports’ most fertile management training ground.

“Recently, a couple of my marketing employees asked me how they could best further their career and I told them, ‘Go run a minor-league baseball team,’ ” said Dick Freeman, president of the San Diego Padres.

“It’s known as a place that teaches you everything.”

Under no pressure from diversity guidelines or mandates, the minors also are a place where pockets of sexism and stereotypes are still tolerated.

It is a legacy that has been passed along since the turn of the century, when front offices weren’t the only part of the game that was all white.

“Baseball is this country’s oldest sport, and it is still a sport run by some 65-year-old man who smokes cigars,” said Lisa Chico, hired by Moore as director of promotions for the Knights. “Their legacy lives on. Your father did it. And you will teach your sons to do it.”

“It’s amazing,” Chico said. “And its frightening.”

Women say they have to keep puncturing the prejudices of those who don’t think they belong in either sports or management.

Minority managers also have to cope with bias, but more often with the isolation that comes from living in a world where most of their colleagues--and more than 95% of the fans--are white.

“I’ll be standing with a white person, somebody will walk up with a question, and they will always direct it to the white person,” said Jeff Maultsby, assistant general manager for the Dodger-owned Vero Beach team in the Class-A Florida State League.

“That person will point to me and say, ‘This is the guy you need to talk to,’ ” said Maultsby, who is African American. “And the person will always go, ‘Oh.’ ”

100-Hour Workweeks

Of course, no matter what one’s race or gender, these jobs are killers.

The minor league executive spends 100-hour workweeks selling tickets, wooing sponsors, arranging promotions . . . while sweeping floors and soothing customers. For this, many are given a place to live and $200. A month.

So why do it?

To break into sports management--but mostly to indulge one’s love of the game.

“Everybody in the organization knows all my numbers--home number, pager number, birthday. . . .” said Melody Tucker, general manager of the Class-A Everett, Wash., Aquasox. “I am on call every day, all day, all night, whenever and wherever.

“I unplug toilets during games. I pull tarp off the field after rain delays. The last time I was pulling tarp, one of the groundskeepers said, ‘Hey, girls don’t do this!’ I said, ‘Shut up and grab a corner.’ ”

Sometimes, the comments are more pointed.

“At times it was very uncomfortable for me to be in the dugout,” said Shereen Samonds, former general manager for the Minnesota Twins’ minor-league team in Orlando. “All sorts of nasty little things being said.

“Baseball is definitely a fraternity, and at times they weren’t opening their arms to include me in their little club.”

When she was included, it could get ugly: “I was standing there at a team party once and this pitcher walked up right behind me and spit tobacco juice on my back.”

The Twins fired him the next day. (Major-league teams do not exert the same control over minor-league front-office managers.)

Some officials do not think women can adapt to the life of a minor league executive.

“There are particular liabilities in lifestyle [for women],” said Branch Rickey, who presides over the Midwest-based American Assn. “You work irregular hours, you leave your home, move to a city that’s not in a major metropolitan area, then get another job and move to another small city.

“How do you hope to move yourself into a new job while moving your husband into a small market where opportunities are decreased for him?”

Jennifer Blatt, a former executive with the Hagerstown, Md., team and currently with an independent Mid America League team, dismisses such comments:

“On the face of it, it looks very stereotypical. Certain assumptions being made about you just because you are a woman. . . .”

Baseball types assumed she wanted to be treated differently: “One of my old general managers would always call me ‘honey’ until I finally said, every time, ‘I’m not your honey, you s.o.b.’ ”

People also assumed that she wanted to date the athletes: “Those players, as a whole, don’t see a lot of women who are much more than groupies,” Blatt said.

If they had taken the time, they would have learned that Blatt grew up learning to love baseball through her grandfather, a former player. After attending her first Baltimore Orioles game at old Memorial Stadium, she was hooked.

Critics say presumptions about women lead to their being clustered at the lower levels.

There are two women general managers among 28 in triple-A, the highest level in this country. The other six women general managers are at the Class-A and rookie league levels, where players are younger and fans have fewer expectations.

Others might see women managers’ potential--or plight--best defined by the comments of officials like George Spelius, president of the Class-A Midwest League:

“Hey,” he said, “I don’t see any harm in having gals as general managers.”

Little Diversity

Even Branch Rickey’s American Assn. is not diversified.

In 1947, his grandfather--the legendary Dodger general manager of the same name--helped Jackie Robinson break baseball’s color barrier.

Rickey presides over eight privately owned teams. There is one woman general manager. Among 117 full-time front office employees, there are five blacks, one Latino and 26 women.

“I don’t see racism or sexism at work here,” said Rickey, who has no control over the hirings in his league. “I see it as a matter of lifestyle choices.”

Pat McKernan, president of the Albuquerque Dukes of the Pacific Coast League, has never employed an African American full time since taking control of the club in 1979. He said it is because affirmative action programs steer potential candidates elsewhere:

“If I’m a smart African American, why go to minor leagues if I can go to a Fortune 500 company?”

Nashville’s Schmittou, whose team plays in the American Assn., said he came to his conclusions about minority hiring after discussions with Jesse Jackson at a baseball convention.

“I told Jesse we aren’t getting enough minority applicants, and his response was, ‘We’re interested in presidents and chief financial officers,’ ” Schmittou said.

“That’s a big lie,” Jackson replied in a recent interview. “You read about the jobs only after they have been consummated. These are jobs that are inherited.”

Will such hiring patterns ever change?

Even in the majors, diversity has come slowly--and, sometimes, painfully.

Professional baseball was first played in 1876, but there was no black player until Jackie Robinson, and no black manager until Frank Robinson took the helm of the Cleveland Indians in 1975.

Eight years ago, then-Dodger general manager Al Campanis caused a firestorm with remarks about blacks’ qualifications as managers. That controversy jump-started pro sports’ management diversity efforts.

Now, there have been two black league presidents. There are four minority managers among 26 major-league teams. In the offices of major league baseball and the National and American leagues, 22% of employees are women or minorities.

Relative progress has come through strong, organized efforts helped by the allure and money of major-league sports.

Any attempt to change the minors may be handicapped by the absence of these things.

Last year at baseball’s winter meetings--the best place to obtain a minor-league front office job--24 of 276 registered job seekers were women. Another five or six were minorities, according to officials.

No one knows if the low numbers among minorities and women were caused by lack of interest, lack of publicity or concerns about the hard life, isolation and potential for prejudice in the minors.

“Nobody has ever said to me, ‘Jeff, I’m doomed in that profession, nobody will give me a chance to advance,’. . . but by no minorities taking action, maybe they are saying that,” said Maultsby, who said he was once the only black at an employment seminar with 250 to 300 attendees.

A few efforts to increase diversity have taken root.

Hollywood producer Alan Levin works with Leanne Harvey, general manager of one of the two minor-league teams that he owns, in a placement service that helped send about 150 minority students to a job seminar two years ago in Atlanta.

Levin also helped sponsor a seminar in Chicago that featured employees from four of the city’s professional teams. They talked about what it means to be a sports executive.

“Some of these numbers are ridiculous,” Levin said of minority and women executives. “You must bring in all different perspectives. I don’t think any homogenous environment is good.”

The Class-A New York-Penn League has sponsored a minority internship program in the past, and is planning another next year.

“My instinct is that there has traditionally been a reluctance on the part of team owners to hire minorities,” said Bob Julian, the league president. “The fit can happen, but it requires management to extend itself.”

The Only Black GM

The pressure is high for Pete Moore. As the minor leagues’ only general manager of color, he is often asked to give speeches to minority youth.

The children expect to hear about athletics. He tells them about the cello.

“I tell kids, you don’t know what tough is until you try carrying a damn cello on a school bus,” said Moore, 31, who played the instrument for seven years while his friends played in the streets of Burlington, N.C.

A childhood of hard work and high expectations from his contractor father and schoolteacher mother resulted in Moore’s unusual entry into the business world.

While playing defensive back for Duke, a football injury allowed him to remain on scholarship for a fifth year of eligibility. But unlike 99% of today’s student-athletes, he turned down the offer and graduated with his class.

After working for a Charlotte-area bank, he obtained his master’s degree in business from Duke. Then he accepted an offer from George Shinn, owner of the Charlotte Hornets NBA team and Charlotte Knights, to learn the business side of sports.

Within his first months on the job, he tripled the number of women on his 14-person staff--from one to three--and doubled the minorities to two.

He has added family-type promotions--including dugout bowling--while keeping meticulous notes about everything in his meticulously clean park.

“I’ve met men in this business who were good ol’ boys . . . and they were young,” said the Knights’ Chico. “Pete is so refreshing . . . he is the kind of person who believes you can’t make excuses for who you are, or what you are. You just do your job.”

Ever mindful of the power of appearances, Moore once conducted one of the more unusual mascot searches. He told his staff they could make the selection among four finalists--on one condition:

The candidates would come and go in a dragon’s outfit.

The staff had to pick the next Homer without seeing the mascot’s face.

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About This Series

The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the workplace and college campuses over the last 30 years. With some now questioning whether giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which will appear periodically throughout 1995, will measure its impact on American institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Previously: Why affirmative action became an issue in 1995, its legal underpinnings, its impact on presidential politics, the difficulties of defining a minority, the views of its beneficiaries, a Times poll showing ambivalent attitudes on the issue, how informal preferences have molded American life, the mind at work in racial stereotyping and the evolution of diversity programs in the workplace.

* Sunday: Ever since Al Campanis’ ill-spoken comments about blacks and their ability to succeed in sports management, coaching and management positions in major league basketball, baseball and football have diversified at a rate that outpaces the rest of American businesses.

* Today: A look at minor league baseball, a place where there are still pockets of sexism and stereotypes, and its efforts to diversify.

* Tuesday: How ultra-efficient recruiting of minority athletes at all grade levels has put a premium in inner city neighborhoods on developing athletic, as opposed to academic, skills.

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Minor League Void

Management of National Assn.-sponsored minor league team is overwhelmingly white and male. Teams: 156 Number of black general managers: 1 Number of women general managers: 8