Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball (review)

Global economic forces have brought tsunamic change to many American industries during the last couple of decades, and Major League Baseball has not been spared. Even as African American players account for only about one out of every twelve major leaguers, international players comprise nearly one third of MLB rosters.¹ Ben Franklin noted long ago in his essay, “Thoughts on Commercial Subjects,” that “no nation was ever ruined by trade,” and it would be difficult to argue that baseball has been compromised by the international expansion of the relevant athlete labor pool. How this expansion came to be and its effects on the national pastime are the focus of Alan Klein’s Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball.

A professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University and the author of Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream, Klein is well-equipped to tackle the matter of baseball’s internationalization. In the first of the book’s eight eclectic chapters, Klein paints the current incarnation of MLB as more of a commissioner-led modern multinational than a sleepy country club of team owners. The two next chapters discuss the effects of globalization on the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Dodgers, subtly making the point that there might be a wrong way and a right way for teams to tap international player markets.

Even a casual follower of American baseball could hardly have failed to notice the ever-more-prominent role of Latin America as an MLB talent farm, but it is likely that even hardcore horsehide aficionados underestimate its level of development. Klein’s analysis of the Dominican Republic’s Wild West baseball ethos, emblemized by the often-unscrupulous dealings of the buscones—part talent scouts, part player agents—makes the case for more responsible oversight by the Dominican government and MLB International. Japanese baseball, in contrast to Dominican Republic ball, is a microcosm of that country’s complex and structured culture. Asian ideals of honor, nation, and the subservience of the individual to the group manifest themselves throughout their game. Whereas Latin American players tend to focus their sights on making the U.S. big leagues, Klein depicts Japanese players as much more ambivalent toward the idea. Not surprisingly, current Japanese American baseball relations seem as diplomatically nuanced as dealings with Europe during the high colonial era.

The state of the game in the developing baseball markets of Italy, Germany, the UK, and South Africa is addressed in two of the volume’s chapters. Players in these baseball Siberias might be using the same rules as those in MLB or the Japanese league, but the money and media attention are more American Legion than American League. The book concludes with a discussion of how the newly minted World Baseball Classic contrasts with FIFA’s World Cup in philosophy, structure, and social impact, and the likelihood of there ever being a truly world competition.

Klein’s most important sources are the personal interviews he conducted with a variety of figures in the international baseball community. His contacts are impressive, but the reader is sometimes left questioning whether the points made are truly reflective of the issues in general or if they are more indicative of the individuals interviewed. There are some good statistics provided in the book—baseball people love numbers, of course—but they are somewhat disjointed. Still, the academic research in this area is sorely lacking, and somebody has to start someplace.

In the same vein, the structure of the book and its chapters was sometimes a bit puzzling. The text occasionally repeats itself (notably among the first four chapters), and an overarching perspective of global baseball never quite materializes. Rather than positing a grand thesis of some sort, the book comes across as a collection of interesting anecdotes. These stories are certainly worth reading—the accounts of the player immigration implications of the September 11 attacks, Fernandomania, Randy Bass’s struggles...