Asian Pacific Americans and Baseball: A History (review)

Organized chronologically and topically, Franks's book presents the history of Asian Pacific Americans in local, college, semi-professional, and professional baseball. He defines Asian Pacific Americans as people "who trace their roots to the Pacific Islands and Asia" (2). Indebted to Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills's The People's Game (Oxford University Press, 1991), Franks intends to create a populist history of Asian Pacific Americans' participation in baseball to chart how they overcame racial exclusion and stereotyping. The book's major theme is the reciprocal importance of Asian Pacific Americans to baseball and baseball to them. Through baseball, they connected with an American culture which in many ways sought to keep them out.

The book consists of seven chapters which trace the history of these players in the Philippines, Hawaii, and west coast communities on the American mainland, documenting their experiences as barnstorming amateurs, as semipros, and as minor and major leaguers in the United States and Japan. By creating this arc replete with details of the players' lives, barnstorming tours, box scores, and the racial politics of various leagues, Franks establishes a sense of the history of their participation in the game, which must now be included with the history of black and Hispanic players. Franks serves as the historian of less-publicized ballplayers who to some extent were discouraged from reaching the highest levels of the sport by racially-inspired policies and reduced expectations.

Franks skillfully interweaves the racial theme with his meticulous recreation of the facts and figures of Asian Pacific American baseball history. He recounts the attitudes from mainland opponents and observers who were emboldened by the national context of official intolerance to describe the Asian Pacific Americans in demeaning terms. The Chinese exclusion law lasted from 1870 to 1930, and there was also the ludicrous brown paper bag racial test which mandated that if a person was as dark or darker than a brown paper bag and he was Asian then he could not become a naturalized American citizen. In addition, as an indication of the prevailing racism, the expression "Chinese" was used in San Francisco to describe a short or fluke home run. The expression continued to be used into the 1950s to describe home runs hit over the short right-field fence in the Polo Grounds.

Franks maintains that baseball helped Asian Pacific Americans resist stereotypes by demonstrating that they loved and could play the game. However, no matter how well they did, they never were allowed to forget who they were racially. In 1914, when rumors abounded that shortstop Tin Lai had been signed by the Chicago White Sox, people expressed the fear that America's game was undergoing an "invasion from China" (122). Franks cites contemporary accounts to demonstrate how barnstorming teams from Hawaii were routinely subjected to scurrilous slurs and racial taunts. Detailing these slurs shows the relevance and complexity of race, including even racial distinctions maintained by those groups who were discriminated against. He charts the bewildering currents of charged racial environments and presents evidence that racism created an exclusionist world where the excluded found relief playing the game. However, after proving that racism did affect most of these players, Franks's conclusion seems too mild: "Sadly, it is not at all clear that even those Asian Pacific Americans who made it into the big leagues in either America or Japan totally escaped racism's traveling eye" (156).

The heart of the book is the capsule biographies of ballplayers who either were defeated in their attempts to achieve success by a combination of racism and their own failings or overcame the racial obstacles to become accomplished professionals, like Wally Yonamine who had a successful career in Japanese professional baseball despite the prejudice he initially experienced for his aggressive American style of play. Among others, Franks includes the stories of Barney Joy, a Chinese Caucasian pitcher who played for the San Francisco Seals in 1907, but was subjected to racial slurs and misrepresentation which...