Rob Manfred was a high school student in upstate New York in 1975 when Frank Robinson became Major League Baseball’s first black manager. Lloyd McClendon was a high school student in Gary, Ind.
Forty years later, Manfred, 57, is Major League Baseball’s commissioner. McClendon, 56, is the manager of the Seattle Mariners. He is also the majors’ lone African-American manager.
“It’s 2015, and it speaks to where we are as a country that we still have to be talking about a black manager instead of a good manager,” McClendon said last week as he sat in the visiting manager’s office at Yankee Stadium.