Every player in the major leagues will wear No. 42 Monday as baseball pays its annual tribute to Jackie Robinson, who integrated the game in 1947 and whose life story will play out in movie theaters nationwide this weekend. Yet few of the players wearing Robinson’s number will be African-American, a trend that has grown increasingly troubling to major league officials.

Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, held the first meeting Wednesday of a 17-member diversity task force to study and address the issue of on-field participation by African-Americans in Major League Baseball.

“I don’t want to miss any opportunity here,” Selig said in a telephone interview Tuesday from his office in Milwaukee. “We want to find out if we’re not doing well, why not, and what we need to do better. We’ll meet as many times as we need to to come to meaningful decisions.”

Dave Dombrowski, the president of the Detroit Tigers, is the chairman of the committee, which includes several other front-office executives, but also Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford; Frank Marcos, the senior director of baseball’s scouting bureau; and the former Mets manager Jerry Manuel.

African-Americans comprised only 8.5 percent of players on 25-man rosters on opening day. The highest percentage of African-Americans playing in the majors, according to new research by Mark Armour from the Society of American Baseball Research, was 19 percent in 1986.

The figure is commonly cited as having peaked at 27 percent in the mid-1970s, but Armour said that percentage included dark-skinned players from Latin-American countries.

“The number got to around 19 percent in the mid-’70s and stayed there,” said Armour, who also studied photographs of every player in the majors over a 40-year span. “I am very confident it didn’t get any higher than 19 percent.”

Even so, the decline is staggering: in the last generation, baseball has lost more than half its percentage of African-American players. Several teams, including the World Series champion San Francisco Giants, have no African-American players at all.

“A lot of people can say, ‘This is a problem,’ ” Dombrowski said. “But trying to come up with a plan and recommendations to get all of these ideas tied together will be extremely important.”

Dombrowski’s team features several prominent African-American players, including Prince Fielder, Torii Hunter and Austin Jackson. He said that while the Tigers have not seen much increase in African-American fans at their games, there has been “tremendous growth” in participation in youth leagues in Detroit.

The Tigers, Dombrowski said, have tried hard the last few years to provide equipment and help cover expenses for local youth players. Major league teams have drafted more than 200 players from the league’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, which was founded in 1989, and baseball also operates several urban youth academies.

But the racial composition of the major leagues has not changed much among African-Americans.

“It’s something we’ve been cognizant of for an extended period,” Dombrowski said. “We’ve tried to do things, but it’s apparent that the numbers aren’t increasing as far as participation is concerned. So even though there have been a lot of good ideas, we need to get to the roots of it.”

LaTroy Hawkins, the veteran reliever for the Mets, said Monday that baseball in the United States had become a game for the rich. Hawkins, who is African-American, said the main problem was that N.C.A.A. Division I baseball programs offered so few scholarships compared with other sports.

Top-level college football programs offer 85 scholarships, all full rides. Division I basketball programs offer 13 full scholarships, also full rides. Division I baseball programs offer 11.7 scholarships, but those are often divided among many players.

“Kids in the inner-city play basketball and football because they give out full scholarships and parents don’t have to worry about anything,” Hawkins said. “In baseball they give out quarter-scholarships. That’s what needs to change.

“In the inner city, you need to get a scholarship because most families can’t afford to send a kid to school, especially when you’ve got more than one. You need to get a scholarship, and baseball doesn’t provide that luxury.”

Hawkins also noted that, well before college, specializing in baseball can mean expensive travel teams and a year-round commitment.

“I played 17 games in high school; I’d have gotten burned out with that much baseball,” Hawkins, a native of Gary, Ind., said of today’s schedules. “But that’s what it requires now, because if you don’t, all the kids that don’t live in the inner-city and live in the affluent neighborhoods, they’re getting ahead of you. You might be a better athlete than they are, but as far as a skilled player, you can’t keep up with that.”

Dombrowski said the scholarship issue was a common thread in his informal conversations on the racial makeup of the game. Selig’s task force seems to recognize the importance of the problem; besides Muir, the Stanford athletic director, the task force also includes Roger Cador, the baseball coach at Southern; and Tony Clark, a former major leaguer who was a multiple-sport star in college.

Clark is now the director of player services for the union, whose African-American members include some of the game’s best players: Matt Kemp and Andrew McCutchen, Adam Jones and C. C. Sabathia, B. J. and Justin Upton, and so on. But there could be so many more.

“I really think our history is so brilliant when it comes to African-Americans,” said Selig, who has a Jackie Robinson jersey in his office. “You think about the late 1940s, the 1950s — wow. And you look at that and you say to yourself, ‘Why did it not continue, and what could we do to make sure it does continue?’ ”

Last month, Major League Baseball and the union staged the third World Baseball Classic, designed to promote the sport internationally. It is a legacy item for Selig, who delighted in watching teams from Europe, China and Brazil, considered untapped markets for talent, compete against traditional powers.

There is no downside, of course, to applying the same goals from that tournament to the growth of the game in the United States. The more good players baseball can find, the better the competition will be.

“We’re trying to do that all over the world, where we talk about growing baseball, and we’re doing it,” Dombrowski said. “But you can’t look past your own country.”

- NY Times