Dusty Baker is gone. Frank Robinson is finished.

Cito Gaston won two World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays but hasn’t seen the inside of a dugout in years. And Don Baylor suffered the same fate a few years ago that befalls losing managers everywhere – he was fired.

So now there is one.

One black manager in baseball.

One.

The same number there was in 1975, the year Robinson made history by becoming the first of his kind in the major leagues.

One.

Not a token one, to be sure. Willie Randolph has some serious credentials, and he just might have his New York Mets on the way to the World Series.

But, in a sport that has liked to pat itself on the back in recent years for opening the way to minority hires, one seems like an awfully lonely number.

“It’s been a concern, and it’s been something that I think Major League Baseball needs to do a better job on addressing,” Randolph said.

Yes, baseball does.

Its good-old-boy system kept minority candidates out of the dugout and front offices for so long the sport is morally obligated to make sure the managerial pool is racially balanced.

It’s hard to fathom today, but it took 28 years from the time Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier before there was a black manager in the major leagues. Robinson said he dreamed of the day a black man would be leading a dugout, but he died before seeing it happen.

Since then, baseball’s diversity record has been an uneven one, though Bud Selig deserves credit for trying to increase the numbers of minority managers and general managers by forcing teams to submit lists of them. It’s worked up to a point, peaking at 10 black and Latino managers in the 2002 season, but the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way with a grand total of three now.

Baseball, though, has a bigger problem. In case you hadn’t noticed, the sport is no longer a black man’s game.

That doesn’t mean baseball isn’t diverse. If anything, it’s more diverse than ever. Two Taiwanese pitchers started in the playoffs, Latinos make up more than a third of all rosters and players from Japan and South Korea are making their presence felt on the field.

But the number of blacks players in the major leagues has fallen to 8 percent, the lowest since the Boston Red Sox became the last team to integrate in 1959.

Last year, the Houston Astros were the first team in 52 years to go to a World Series without one black player on the roster. And the number of black players in colleges, Little League or on the sandlots is shrinking every year.

Somewhere along the way, baseball lost its appeal to black youth. The sport became irrelevant, and baseball owners were too busy building new stadiums with luxury boxes to seem to care.

It might be different if the parents were baseball fans, but there’s not many of those, either. Do your own test during the playoffs – count the number of black fans you see when a foul ball is hit into the stands.

It’s startling few, even in Washington, D.C., where 57.7 percent of the population is black.

Baseball needs black managers, and it needs more black executives like Ken Williams, who put together the White Sox team that won the World Series last year.

A bigger worry, though, is figuring out what happened to black players and black fans.

Because baseball needs them even more.