Cup of Coffee: March 21, 2025

Good morning!

One down:

The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure . . . John Ullyot, a public affairs official who also held senior communications roles during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, is expected to take another role within the Defense Department working on “special projects,” said a person familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel decision . . . Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson

Happy to see this total dead-eyed piece of crap wind up in a dead-end backwater purgatory over all of this. Happy to have played a small part in the uproar that made it happen.

Bring on the next one. There's more of us than you.

Let's get at 'er.

The Daily Briefing

What happened to MLB's Diversity Pipeline Program?

Update (3:36 PM): Via The Athletic, Major League Baseball released a statement about all of this:

“As the commissioner stated, our values on diversity remain unchanged. We are in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward."

To say this is an empty non-answer is an understatement.

When a college or an employer tweaks their eligibility criteria they don't completely scrub the application pages from their websites. And, knowing the reporters on that Athletic Story, I know that they asked MLB what "federal law" they're worried impacts a private employer's diversity application program, which makes the league's statement both evasive and condescending.

The inescapable conclusion here is that Major League Baseball's decision makers are cowards. They've had a much-lauded and respected diversity program for nearly a decade but the minute political winds changed they trashed it so as not to displease Donald Trump. I strongly suspect that they have no intention of bringing the program back.

Keep all this in mind when MLB engages in its annual coopting of Jackie Robinson's legacy next month. When it takes credit for his accomplishments while, quite clearly, sharing none of his values.

6:00 AM: Yesterday I noted that Major League Baseball had altered what was once its "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" webpage, removing that title, and scrubbing the word "diversity" from it. That does not appear to be an isolated incident.

I've done some digging on the MLB website the past couple of days, comparing various pages to their archived versions from November and December. My most notable find: Major League Baseball has almost completely eliminated the webpage for its Diversity Pipeline Program. And it's not even clear if the program itself exists any longer.

The Diversity Pipeline Program was created by Rob Manfred in 2016 in response to a recognition that the game was overwhelmingly hiring white people in key positions. The goal of the program is to "identify and develop a broad spectrum of well-qualified candidates in Baseball Operations departments at all 30 Clubs and the MLB Office of the Commissioner." The idea is to seek out applicants for referral for interviews for opportunities across all of baseball, including player development, player evaluation/scouting, managing, coaching, analytics, research and development, front office roles, and umpiring.

While MLB still has a way to go to achieve a truly diverse workforce, those I have spoken to in and around the game have praised the program, telling me that they have hired multiple candidates through the Pipeline program and that they have noticed an increasing diversification in the game over the nine years since its founding. I am not privy to any numbers in this regard but, anecdotally, that tracks. There are far more people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people in the game than there were a decade ago, and many credit the Pipeline Program for helping to make that possible.

Not that the Pipeline Program has been popular with everyone. In October 2023, the far right wing non-profit known as America First Legal, which was founded and, per its webpage, is still run by Donald Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed an EEOC complaint against Major League Baseball alleging that its various diversity programs, including the Diversity Pipeline Program, are discriminatory. It's just one of many complaints America First Legal has filed in a transparent effort to hijack the EEOC’s mission from one that aims to protect the equal rights of marginalized people to one that seeks to disingenuously portray white people as victims of discrimination.

That complaint notwithstanding, until late last year the Diversity Pipeline Program had its own webpage which in set forth its purpose, solicited applications, and invited candidates to reach out directly to its director, Tyrone Brooks. As of November 18, the last time the page was archived by the Wayback Machine, it appeared like this:

Beneath it, at least in November, were two partner programs and upcoming events: the SABR analytics conference, which has since taken place, and The Buck O'Neil Professional Baseball Scouts and Coaches Association.

As of now, the page no longer references the Pipeline program at all. The words "Pipeline Program" are still in the URL and page title which auto-populates in your browser, but it does not appear in the body of the page. There is no content related to the program at all, in fact. There is no place for applicants to submit their information and Tyrone Brooks' email is no longer present. All that appears is a reference to the Buck O'Neil Association partnership with no active links and no context about it whatsoever. This, in fact, is now the entire page:

A search of the entire MLB website for "Diversity Pipeline Program" returns no current web page for it, not even the all-but-obliterated one referenced above. It brings back just five results, in fact, the most recent of which was an article written about the SABR Conference from March 2024, two of which are general articles from 2022 and 2021, and two of which are articles announcing Brooks' hiring back in 2016. Beyond that, it's as if the Diversity Pipeline Program no longer exists.

Some more creative searching of the MLB website did bring back an article from December 23, 2024, in which MLB.com's Alyson Footer reported on a couple of diversity-related events at the Winter Meetings and which, in addition to quotes from Brooks, does mention the Pipeline Program in passing. It also notes that hundreds of employees have been hired through the Pipeline Program over the years, but it does not center the program nor link to it. MLB's website also has a video of Rob Manfred praising the Pipeline Program and other diversity efforts in November of 2016.

There does still exist a page for something called the Diversity Fellowship Program, which contains multiple references to "diversity." At first I wondered if that was just a renamed version of the Pipeline Program housed at a new URL, but further research reveals that the Fellowship Program is for grant applicants to a handful of specific jobs in front offices, whereas the Pipeline is a generalized job board for diverse candidates. Bolstering that is the fact that (a) per the Wayback Machine, the Fellowship site existed last year when the Pipeline page was still up, suggesting it was a parallel program, not the same thing; and (b) the America First Legal EEOC complaint names the Diversity Fellowship Program separately from the Pipeline Program.

Moving beyond the Pipeline and Fellowship pages, there still remain some pages at the MLB site which relate do diversity programs. For example, there is still a page for MLB's Diversity Business Partners program, which solicits and encourages diverse vendors. There are other links, however, which appeared to have once connected to pages for specific diversity programs and initiatives but which now simply send you back to the generic "inclusivity" page I highlighted yesterday, with the word "diversity" removed.

Which is to say, this does not seem to be a particularly purposeful or comprehensive removal of all diversity-related material on the part of Major League Baseball. It's almost as if someone went through searching for the word "diversity" in page headings and titles, did their best to scrub some of the super obvious ones, but didn't go whole-hog.

While it's admittedly just my speculation, the site as it currently exists could reflect a hasty effort to try to fly under the radar in fraught political times. It would not, however, explain what appears to be the wholesale elimination of a much lauded program such as the Diversity Pipeline Program, especially without any notice or reporting about it.

Yesterday afternoon I reached out to MLB press officials and, separately, to Tyrone Brooks for comment. As of publication time this morning I have not gotten a response. I will continue to follow up on this until someone can provide some answers.