Major League Baseball is launching a diversity fellowship for women and people of color, a program that will place candidates with teams and the league’s central office.
The new fellowship program will place about 20 candidates for positions with teams and three more with the league. The application process, limited to women and people of color, will run from Friday through November 17, with the selected candidates announced in April. Education requirements call for candidates to have earned a bachelor’s, master’s, or related advanced degree within the last two years.
With this latest initiative, MLB is launching a program that it hopes will help to recruit a diverse pool of candidates for careers within the sport. More from The AP:
“We knew we have to be a lot more deliberate on how we design a program,” said Renee Tirado, MLB’s vice president of talent acquisition, diversity & inclusion. “Diversity inclusion is an agenda for many organizations, so our competition is stiff.”
Among professional positions in MLB’s central office, 12.1 percent of employees were African-American, 10.2 percent Latino, 4.3 percent Asian and 29.3 percent women, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida said in April. Among team professional administration, 21.9 percent were people of color and 28.1 percent women, the report said.
“The fellowship program is a coordinated approach by MLB to recruit diverse graduating students at universities throughout the United States by offering them the opportunity to compete for a prestigious fellowship in the front office of an MLB club,” MLB Chief Legal Officer Dan Halem said. “The goal is to attract individuals who would not otherwise consider an MLB career without the structure and benefits offered by the fellowship program.”
Fellowships with the teams will include an 18-month commitment, while those with the league office will last for three years. That period will include two with baseball operations, and another in the league’s economics department.
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