A column last month about minority hiring did not please a reader.

“Should the NBA be required to have a fixed percentage of white players on each roster that reflects the actual makeup of the population?” the reader wrote in an e-mail.” Get off the soapbox on this issue already; it is very 1990’s. The guys who are qualified will get hired.”

I would like to think so, but I know from too much experience, from the 1990s and before and since that’s not true. The guys who are qualified are not always hired, especially if they are black or Latino. I don’t know if owners of major league baseball teams are bigoted or racist, but I feel certain they are not color blind.

They do not give blacks and Latinos a fair chance for general managers’ and managers’ jobs, and that’s why I raise the issue periodically. This is one of those periods, and I am prompted to raise it now because of three articles I have read recently, two at ESPN.com, one in The New York Times.

The ESPN articles were written by two of its baseball analysts, Doug Glanville and Alex Cora, in the form of a debate over the so-called Selig Rule, a requirement established by Commissioner Bud Selig in 1999 for clubs to interview minorities for decision-making positions, including general manager and manager.

The debate is meaningless because the rule has become meaningless, beginning in Selig’s latter years as commissioner and continuing through the start of the term of Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred.

It’s unfortunate that Glanville and Cora conducted their debate without knowing the reality of the rule. It’s also unfortunate that the third article, by Tyler Kepner of The New York Times, was bathed in the same substance of which rose-colored glasses are made.

Whether out of ignorance or reluctance, the writers opted to avoid criticism of Major League Baseball for its failure to treat minorities fairly. Owners and general managers, of course, have a right to hire anyone they want. They just always seem to hire white guys. Blacks and Latinos need not apply.

Selig introduced his mandatory-interview rule in 1999. “The Selig Rule,” Glanville wrote, “came about because the commissioner of baseball, by his own assessment, knew things weren’t changing enough.”

Glanville, however, hasn’t done his homework. Selig acted at the urging of Len Coleman, who was in his last year as National League president. Coleman, in fact, was behind most, if not all Selig did relating to minorities – annual recognition of Jackie Robinson, for example – though Selig claims credit for it all.

Coleman, however, is no longer around so some of the initiatives have waned, particularly MLB’s concern for minority hiring. Manfred begs to differ, Cora wrote in his part of the ESPN.com debate:

“Just this past February, commissioner Rob Manfred mentioned on Outside the Lines that one team had been fined for violating the Selig Rule.

“’It was a situation in which a club had identified a particular candidate and didn’t really think of it as an interview process, even though there was an opening,’ Manfred said. ‘They really had their mind made up as to where they were going.’”

Manfred didn’t identify the team, but he took no known action against four known teams that last off-season appeared to concoct a scheme that enabled four teams to meet the interview requirement with no intention of hiring the minority candidates they interviewed.

Four black executives were interviewed by four different teams for general managers’ vacancies: Quinton McCracken by the Red Sox, Dana Brown by the Mariners, Tyrone Brooks by the Brewers, Chris Gwynn by the Angels.

Do I know for certain that the interviewing teams went into the interviews with no intention of hiring the black candidates? No, but…and it’s a big but. All four were mid-level executives with their teams, none in position to be realistically hired as a general manager.

In addition, the Brewers, one of the four teams, were the team that Manfred pushed to hire a white candidate, David Stearns, as general manager. Manfred pushed for Stearns because the 31-year-old Stearns had worked for him in the commissioner’s office.

In his part of the debate, Cora also wrote:

“In that same Outside the Lines, commissioner Rob Manfred talked about the issue. He mentioned the process and what MLB is trying to do to improve it, not only on the field but also in other areas of the game. The thing I didn’t appreciate was Manfred’s talking about education and how it might be specifically affecting Latinos because the game is evolving with advanced statistics and computers.

“’Obviously, the quantitative part of our game has exploded,’ Manfred said. ’And, you know, to the extent that you’re dealing with big data, analyzing that data and making decisions based on that data, higher education can be an advantage.’”

Cora has good reason not to appreciate that comment. I did not hear Manfred say it, but when I read it, Al Campanis immediately came to mind. Campanis was forced to resign as the Los Angeles Dodgers general manager in 1987 after he said in a national television interview blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.”

Yet Manfred was allowed to get away with saying blacks and Latinos can’t get general managers and managers jobs because they don’t know analytics.

At the end of his article, Cora got it right. “Seriously, are we really trying?” he wrote. “Why have the rule in the first place if the rule is clearly not working?”

“It’s time to change the rules,” he added. “More importantly, it’s time to open the minds of the people who make decisions.”

Glanville, meanwhile, argued for retention of the Selig Rule.

“The Selig Rule,” he wrote, “is for more than on-field managers. It has added inclusive hiring practices, with positive results, for many throughout the league and within a team’s administration. Goodwill is important to reversing a long-standing lack of diversity at baseball’s highest levels.”

But what has the Selig Rule or any effort done for minorities? I have cited these figures before. In the last two years teams have hired or promoted 47 top-ranking executives and managers, of whom 42 are white males. Only 10.6 percent are minorities, which would translate to a .106 batting average, not nearly good enough to make any team, major league or minor.

The New York Times, however, doesn’t find it necessary or worthwhile citing such figures. In an article headlined “A Success Story Awaits the Draft,” Kepner wrote glowingly about a college outfielder, Corey Ray.

He is black, and as a high draft choice, Kepner said, will help alleviate MLB’s struggles to attract black players. “It’ll be exciting to see Corey get drafted,” Kepner quoted the Mets’ Curtis Granderson, like Ray a Chicago product, who has worked out with Ray.

But aside from writing that the absence of blacks “is also felt in positions of authority” and mentioning two black managers and two black executives, Kepner wrote nothing about the overwhelming preference for white managers and white executives. He said nothing about the absence of Latinos since the Atlanta Braves fired Fredi Gonzalez as their manager earlier this season.

But Kepner’s approach to the story is not surprising. Better that the national baseball writer with the biggest platform in the country to give the Times a feel-good story about a young black baseball player than to mount a challenge to baseball’s shameful treatment of its blacks and Latinos.

Finally, to the reader who urged me to quit being so 1990s, better luck next week and thanks for writing.