Major League Baseball is so pleased with and proud of itself for observing Jackie Robinson Day every April 15, the date Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, officials dwell on the past and ignore the present. They apparently think the annual one-day celebration expiates all of the racial sins they have committed and absolves them of those sins.

What sins might those be? The primary sin is the failure of teams to hire minority candidates for the two most significant positions of manager and general manager, or president of baseball operations, as the top front-office job has become in recent years.

And as teams fail to do what’s right and decent, the commissioner fails to do his job of opening the owners’ eyes to see what they are doing is as bad as what their ancestors did 80 and 90 and 100 years ago.

What would Robinson say, if he were around today, about the blatantly bad treatment teams show blacks and Latinos who want a chance to be a general manager or a manager? He wouldn’t be kind, and he would very likely tell Commissioner Rob Manfred to knock off the celebration for his breaking the color barrier and spend his time and effort more fruitfully on behalf of blacks and Latinos who seek those other jobs.

Despite his occasional and meaningless boasts, Manfred has done nothing in his 27 months as commissioner that improves the status minorities had under Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig, who likes to think he performed a great deed by establishing Jackie Robinson Day.

Selig, though, was commissioner for a dozen April 15s before he established Jackie Robinson Day, and he would never have done it at all if Len Coleman, the African-American former National League president, hadn’t relentlessly pushed him to do it.

Yet Selig gets away with being quoted in Wikipedia as saying, “I have often stated that baseball’s proudest moment and its most powerful social statement came on April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson first set foot on a Major League Baseball field. On that day, Jackie brought down the color barrier and ushered in the era in which baseball became the true national pastime.”

Sadly, a racial barrier still exists. It’s not the kind of wall that existed before Robinson, or that would keep Mexicans out of the United States, but major league club owners have done a good job on their own in keeping blacks and Latinos out of dugouts and front offices No one accuses them of racism, but they are as racist as the owners of days before Branch Rickey.

Since Manfred became commissioner in January 2015, clubs have hired 11 managers and 15 general managers or presidents of baseball operations. Of those 26 hires, three are minorities – managers Dusty Baker of Washington and Dave Roberts of Los Angeles and Al Avila, the Detroit general manager.

The popular count is three managers, but I exclude Rick Renteria of the Chicago White Sox. His heritage is Hispanic, but he was born and raised in southern California, eliminating him from minority status.

Renteria is different from Roberts, the Los Angeles manager, who was born in Okinawa, and Avila, who was born in Cuba.

There are no official guidelines for determining who is and who isn’t a member of a minority group, but common sense can prevail. Unfortunately, M.L.B. doesn’t always do well by that standard.

For example, this year’s annual report on diversity hiring in baseball, compiled by Dr. Richard Lapchick and the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, has errors that, because of the few people involved, could affect the grades awarded them by Lapchick.

In one section, among minority general managers in 2016, the report listed Jeff Luhnow of Houston. Luhnow, though, is not a minority. He was born in Mexico, but that was because his parents lived there as the result of his father’s advertising business. This year’s list does not include Luhnow.

This year’s list, however, includes Kenny Williams as a minority baseball executive, holding “the position of Executive Vice President, Baseball Operations for the White Sox, and is the Club’s top baseball operations official (African American).”

Williams is African-American, all right, but his title doesn’t say anything about baseball operations, and neither does his job description.

I tried to reach Lapchick to ask him to explain the mistakes, but he was traveling and had an assistant call me instead. The assistant explained that the lists of minority officials in the report weren’t compiled by Lapchick or his aides but were provided by M.L.B.

If one wishes to be cynical about such an operation, one could speculate that M.L.B. added Williams and Luhnow to make the lists look better. But I am prepared to accept the mistakes as mistakes, and they shouldn’t let it happen again.

My problem with Lapchick’s report is its inclusion of all M.L.B. jobs. That obviously is Lapchick’s intention, to cover gender and racial hiring in the entire sport, but all of the extraneous jobs muddy the true picture of baseball’s poor hiring record.

When the commissioner can push a team to hire a particular white guy because he worked for him, it doesn’t speak well for the commissioner or the sport.

The Lapchick report and grading system didn’t take that scheme into account in awarding M.L.B. a B for racial hiring. I know that the report goes beyond manager and general manager, but for its record for those positions under Manfred alone, M.L.B. should get a failing grade – a big fat F.

I‘ve always said I would have loved to have had Lapchick as a professor.

Besides issuing grades, the Lapchick report notes steps the commissioner’s office has taken to enhance diversity hiring. Among the steps noted in this report is the appointment of a “diversity pipeline program advisory council.”

Two of the 11 committee members are probably two of the most interviewed people for general managers’ jobs who haven’t succeeded in gaining general managers’ jobs – Kim Ng, an executive in the commissioner’s office, and De Jon Watson, a late hire as special assistant to the Washington Nationals’ general manager.

LATINOS RISING, BLACKS FALLING

While the number of African-American players in Major League Baseball continues to drop significantly, the Latino population is soaring. These percentages, compiled by the commissioner’s office, are based on opening-day lineups and disabled lists:

SORRY I ASKED

The question, I thought, was simple. The answer not so much. But the answer brings back to this space a familiar voice, a writer who got his start here and then went off to TheRinger.com, where you can often find Zach Kram, a writer of whom I am most proud.

I must admit I am not too fond of his immersion in modern metrics, but I have come to recognize that this whole metrics thing is generational so let the kids have their metrics. They won’t beat batting average, home runs and runs batted in, and far fewer fans will be able to figure out the new-fangled stuff for themselves, but that’s their problem.

Thinking one day last week about defensive play and how pitchers could be affected depending on how good or bad their team’s defense was, I asked Zach this question:

Is there an “advanced” statistic (that is an arrogant term) that measures pitchers’ e.r.a. adjusted for defense? If there isn’t, there should be. After all, just as all ball parks aren’t created equal, all defenses aren’t equal and if a team’s shortstop has limited range, it affect pitchers’ ability to get ground ball outs and double plays.

Zach’s reply:

You have stumbled upon probably the single biggest debate about how to judge pitcher performance, and there are multiple schools of thought on how to disentangle the relative successes and failures of pitchers versus those of the defenses behind them.

The most prominent stat here is FIP, short for fielding independent pitching, which operates under the assumption that pitchers are responsible only for strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed, so it calculates a number on the same scale as ERA (i.e., less than 3 is good, more than 5 is bad, etc.) based only on Ks, BBs, and HRs.

Comparison studies show that FIP is more predictive of future success than ERA because a pitcher who strikes batters out and doesn’t walk many will probably maintain those qualities, while a pitcher who relies on his defense might see the players behind him change, or bloopers start to fall, or line drives caught, or whatnot.

From FanGraphs’s summary of why FIP is a good metric: “Research has shown that pitchers have very little control on the outcome of balls in play, so while we care about how often a pitcher allows a ball to be put into play, whether a ground ball goes for a hit or is turned into an out is almost entirely out of their control … Imagine two pitchers who always throw the same quality pitches to identical hitters, but one pitcher throws in front of a vastly superior defense.

The pitcher with the better defense will allow fewer hits, and therefore fewer runs, but the two pitchers performed identically … Essentially, FIP is an attempt to measure how well a pitcher actually performed independent of factors outside of his control that contribute to runs allowed based statistics. FIP is not perfect and there are certain pitchers who have the skills to allow fewer runs than their FIP suggests, but they are reasonably rare and FIP remains highly accurate and extremely simple at the same time.”

Last season, the top 5 starters by FIP were Clayton Kershaw, Noah Syndergaard, José Fernández, James Paxton, and Stephen Strasburg—in other words, four aces and Paxton, whom I selected for The Ringer as my “breakout” player this season in large part because his FIP was so good last year. So far, so good: Paxton has a 1.39 ERA in five starts after the Mariners improved their defense in the offseason and his batted-ball luck increased accordingly.

However, even people who cite FIP (like me!) acknowledge that it likely goes too far in ignoring all manner of batted balls that aren’t homers. After all, some pitchers are better than others at inducing weak contact as opposed to line drives, and FIP doesn’t account for that. (Last year, the Cubs allowed the lowest batting average on balls in play ever, relative to the league average, and there was a good deal of debate in analytical circles about how much credit belonged to the defense versus the pitching staff generating soft contact that was relatively easy to field.)

And even some of the stats it does use—strikeouts and walks—are also subject to the defense’s impact, as a pitcher with a good catcher who can “frame” strikes will get more borderline calls than one with a bad catcher. In general, a batter’s individual performance and contributions are much easier to measure with high levels of confidence than a pitcher’s.