A week ago, Delmon Young wasn’t famous. Hardcore baseball fans were well aware that Young – a 20-year-old right fielder and former no. 1 overall draft pick who probably could have held his own had he gone straight from high school to the majors – was the consensus top prospect in baseball, but it’s a long way from that kind of fame to becoming the latest symbol for the villainy of athletes. Now, whatever he does, the public is going to recognize him as that guy who threw a bat at an umpire, and within the baseball world people are really starting to reevaluate his status as a top prospect.

That’s perfectly fair. There’s a big difference between the kind of silliness that lots of 20-year-old athletes get into and something as unprecedented and violent as throwing a bat at an umpire. I hope along with everyone else that Young gets his temper under control and realizes his enormous potential, but you have to wonder whether someone who has so little control over himself will ever do so. To throw the bat Young had to walk away from the situation, then actually turn around and fire it. If this wasn’t premeditated assault, it was also far enough away from the sort of regrettable mistake anyone could make in the heat of the moment to make you seriously wonder about Young’s stability.

The incident raises an issue that deserves a lot more discussion, though, which I’m more interested in posing as an open question than trying to answer: Does a prominent black ballplayer like Young have a special responsibility to keep himself under control?

I don’t mean, by posing the question, to say that ballplayers should be reduced to the color of their skin; Young is obviously an individual, accountable for his own actions. It’s impossible, though, to ignore the context of those actions. In 1975, blacks made up 27% of the baseball population; as of last year, that number was 9%. With the huge drop in black participation in the game at all levels, every black player has that much more potential to become a symbol of one sort or another, portrayed in a way that will reduce him to another monodimensional actor in the ongoing drama of American race.

Some, like Marlins ace Dontrelle Willis, are held up as role models whose charisma and righteousness might inspire young athletes to put down their basketballs and pick up their bats. Others, like Milton Bradley, are spoken of in uneasy euphemisms – “background,” “volatile,” “inner city” – as people try to avoid coming out and calling them “angry black men.”

This isn’t, of course, fair to everyone. Life, though, isn’t always fair. It isn’t fair that Gary Sheffield, an incredibly intense and unusually honest ballplayer, has spent his career bouncing from one club to the next while being tagged a clubhouse cancer, while the quite similar (though far, far less productive) Paul O’Neill earned a reputation as a leader and warrior.

Nor is it fair that Young has been drawing more comparisons to Albert Belle than to Roberto Alomar or Pete Rose, both of whom, unlike Belle, had physical confrontations with umpires. A Google News search for Young’s name and Belle’s pulls up 210 hits. Plug in Alomar and you get six hits; Rose gets you one.

Such, though, is the reality. Just as a matter of self-preservation, a young black ballplayer should go out of his way to be the most upstanding citizen he can be, because things a lot less bad than throwing a bat at an umpire can turn a player from a normal young athlete into a raging race stereotype for the rest of his career. Even in the best circumstances – and allowing that there have been many exceptions – a black baseball player is going to be judged more harshly for the same actions than a while player.

More than this, though, is the question of responsibility. Do Young and other black baseball players owe it to the athletes who will follow them to meet the (sometimes subtle, but still real) prejudices of the press, teams, and the fans with exemplary conduct?

Sixty years ago, even 30 years ago, this would not have been a controversial question. The players who broke the color line (and it was a long process, not undertaken by Jackie Robinson alone) understood explicitly that the prejudice they faced required them to be absolutely beyond reproach. The players who solidified their gains did, as well – Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson and Willie Mays were absolutely conscious of the legacy they were continuing and the one they were leaving for new generations of ballplayers.

There are many, many stories of the fraternity they and dozens of other players built to protect and nurture the careers of young black players breaking into the majors, and it’s not at all rare to hear veterans today lamenting the decline of that network as blacks have become such an increasingly small minority in the game.

One could very well take it as a good thing that these expectations no longer exist; the right to be taken as an individual, and not as a representative of a larger group, is exactly what pioneers like Larry Doby and Hank Thompson were fighting for. That would be naive, though. Ugly as it is, Delmon Young isn’t going to be the only one to pay for his mistakes; there are amateur ballplayers who will be scrutinized more closely and given less benefit of the doubt right now because of what he did. I wouldn’t presume to lecture him on it, but one would hope that he’d rather carry on Hank Aaron’s legacy than Albert Belle’s.

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As a few thoughtful readers pointed out to me, in last Friday’s column I made a rather infelicitous choice of words in my lede, which was, “Lastings Milledge is a fraud.” While I do think Milledge is an overhyped prospect, he’s done nothing whatever to deserve being called a fraud, and I should have used a different phrasing. I apologize to Milledge.

tmarchman@nysun.com