ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how youth sports, aided by gentrification, facilitated the formation of social capital that led to the racial integration of a segregated neighborhood in Philadelphia. The challenge is to understand the particular circumstances when sports experiences are positive and healthy and when they are negative and destructive and to explain how and why. The chapter addresses this challenge by exploring tensions related to a process of racial integration and class encounters in a neighborhood baseball league in the gentrifying Philadelphia neighborhoods. It explores the features of neighborhood baseball that might have made a transition toward racial integration a relatively smooth one. Beyond the demographic changes and the accountability to Black politicians, the answer of racial transformation relates to: "race sponsorship" and the nature of baseball. The encounter of folks of different socioeconomic backgrounds permits look at how the competing class cultures of diverse parents created conflicting expectations about rights in and responsibilities toward public space and voluntary organizations.
