Twenty-Five Years of Stacking Research in Major League Baseball: An Attempt at Explaining This Re-Occurring Phenomenon

The longest continuous thread in sport sociology research is the study of stacking. Briefly put, the phenomenon of stacking discussed and analyzed in this essay means the placement of African-American baseball players in non-central positions more often than they are placed in core positions. Most American research studies have been concentrated on the sports of football, soccer, basketball and, to a larger extent, baseball. While discussions of stacking are often severed from the structural changes in the larger economy and society, this research provides a different perspective by concentrating less on primary empirical research and concentrating more on addressing theoretical issues that have been only peripherally addressed in the empirical studies. We hypothesize that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term stacking are primarily issues of social isolation, marginalization and the systematic discrimination against African American athletes on and off playing fields.