Every October the World Series is meant to create legends of the fall and remind us that baseball is the game with the most enduring hold on the American psyche. But there has always been a lurking challenge to comfortable assumptions about its right to regard itself as a unifying enthusiasm of the nation. It comes from the overwhelming evidence of a stubborn resistance to baseball’s appeal among African-Americans in the inner cities, a resistance that appears to be growing in spite of the determined, heavily financed efforts at evangelism mounted by those in control of the sport at professional level.

Tampa Bay and Philadelphia have begun this year’s World Series to the accompaniment of a gloomy debate on the significance of statistics that show the percentage of black players in the major leagues has plummeted to 8.2, a figure made even more extraordinary by the comparable percentage for just 10 years ago, in 1997, which was 17. Some have chosen to identify cause for optimism in the composition of the two teams competing for the championship this season. Both the Rays and the Phillies have African-Americans who can be considered a new generation of stars, and there is bold talk of how they could inspire black athletes to commit themselves to a career in baseball.

The Phillies’ first baseman Ryan Howard and their shortstop Jimmy Rollins are both National League MVP award winners, and the Rays’ exciting slugger BJ Upton and their dramatically successful 23-year-old pitcher David Price have had prominent roles in the transformation of the Florida team from a laughing stock into contenders for the biggest prize. So Rollins is entitled to hope there is a message for the boys in the hood: “They see you have success. They see you look like them, and you came from a place similar to them. And they say, ‘He made it. Why can’t I at least give it a shot?’”

But obviously the ability of African-Americans to be outstandingly successful performers in baseball has never been in doubt. Even before Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues in 1947, legendary feats were illuminating the Negro leagues. Their most famous source was the pitching phenomenon Satchel Paige, but his talent didn’t flourish in isolation and after Robinson’s breakthrough it was natural that the subsequent history of the game should be punctuated by glorious contributions from black masters of the diamond. Barry Bonds’s record-breaking blasting of home runs should have raised him high in the ranks of those heroes but his involvement with drug scandals, and his troubles with federal prosecutors, which are due to culminate in a trial on obstruction-of-justice charges next March, have not only removed him from baseball’s centre-stage but left a void of disenchantment where he stood.

According to Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, whose annual Racial and Gender Report Card revealed how depressingly low the percentage of African-American players in major league baseball is, Bonds’s disgrace has substantially exacerbated the problem. “One of the reasons for the decline,” says Lapchick, “has been because the one African-American superstar over the last decade has been somebody that the media and fans have torn apart.”

Yet the statistics established by Lapchick’s own study, which relates to 2007 calculations, would appear to confirm patterns of preference on the part of aspiring black athletes that run far too deep to be affected more than marginally by the disillusioning waywardness of an individual role model. When the percentage of African-Americans in MLB was at 17 back in 1997 it already looked scrawny alongside the equivalents for the NFL and the NBA. Now the 8.2 has to suffer comparison with the fact that 66% of the players in pro football’s top league are black and that the preponderance is still more remarkable in basketball, where the percentage is 76.

Not surprisingly, blacks in baseball are hugely outnumbered not only by whites but by Hispanic players. Lapchick gives the current Latino percentage as 29.1 and he shows, in another jarring comparison, that African-Americans outnumber Asians by not quite two to one. That so little of the US’s immense reservoir of black athletic talent is filtering into baseball renders claims that it is the game closest to the nation’s heart a one-eyed assertion. Writing in The New York Times earlier this year William C Rhoden was in elegiac mood as he asked why African-Americans had “all but vanished from the baseball landscape”. He added: “The answers name all the usual suspects: the pull of other sports, a lack of open spaces in the inner city and a lack of interest. These are symptoms of a more deeply rooted problem of economics and class. Baseball in the United States remains an enclave primarily for white athletes; a confluence of factors like segregated housing patterns and economics, conspire to keep it that way.”

Rhoden is an informed and authoritative witness, not somebody an outsider should readily question. However, from a distance it does seem that for many blacks there may be a subconscious obstacle to embracing a game whose mythology is so impregnated with a nostalgia founded in white Americans’ ideas about themselves. So much of the sentiment surrounding baseball is bathed in the ambience of a Norman Rockwell painting and suspicions of it among urban blacks may be strong enough to outweigh the influence of African-American success stories in the sport.

But perhaps any more theorising on this issue by an interloper from across the Atlantic would be offensive, so it’s probably time to take the slightly less provocative option of admitting to some fervent hopes for the Series that went into Game 3 last night with the Phillies and Rays tied on one victory each. Tampa Bay’s turnaround of their fortunes is a romantic story but too many of their fans are bandwagon-jumpers. Philadelphia is the only city in the US with four major team sports – American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey – that has gone 25 years without a championship in any of them, and I have to root with the Phillies’ more genuine followers. I agree with the man who said those who have cried in their beer deserve to taste the champagne.

Flying filly has mix of femininity and flair

HARDENED denizens of the racetrack were in danger of sounding like bad lyric poets at Santa Anita on Friday as they strained to articulate the impression made on them by a four-year-old filly. Zenyatta was only a length and a half ahead of Cocoa Beach at the line but in fact she had left an ostensibly competitive field looking no more threatening than an empress’s retinue. After her demonstration of the old Turf truth that total supremacy can be electrifying, there was a feeling of privilege at having been there to witness it. And a strong suspicion that nothing produced by the remarkable male animals in Breeders’ Cup action yesterday could implant a more vivid or lasting memory.

Of course, everybody knew in advance that calling Zenyatta exceptional was an understatement. Though she has been racing less than a year, she came to the $2m, mile-and-a-furlong Ladies’ Classic with eight straight victories already to her credit and the inclusion among her rivals of the defending champion, Ginger Punch, did not prevent her from being a 2-1 on favourite to remain unbeaten.

An opportunity to see Zenyatta close up before she went into the paddock prior to the race invoked sympathy for her opponents. She is a big girl, almost an equine Amazon, but all the parts are put together so impressively that the sense of power conveyed doesn’t detract from the femininity of her presence. In the preliminaries she was lively bordering on skittish but was a model of sober professionalism once she entered the stalls in the familiar company of Mike Smith, one of the most successful jockeys in Breeders’ Cup history.

Smith immediately settled her in last place, 10 lengths off the pace, and he was content to keep her that distance adrift until there was less than half a mile to run. Then, when he eventually asked her to close, he gave further evidence of extreme confidence by taking her so wide that she was six or seven lanes off the rail as she swung majestically round the bend into the home stretch. That simply meant she was nearer to the cheering thousands in the stands as she galloped towards recognition as much more than merely the female lead of this horseracing festival.

End this Beckham circus

Hand-wringing anxiety hasn’t been an automatic reaction in Los Angeles to suggestions that speculation linking David Beckham to AC Milan may presage a fully fledged transfer deal. Beckham’s 16 months at the LA Galaxy have coincided with a downward spiral of abysmal form for a club meant to be a power in Major League Soccer. The Los Angeles Times football writer Grahame L Jones reads the facts unequivocally: “The Beckham circus could fold its tents and then the club could go back to being what it once was – competitive in MLS.”