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

Alan Klein is one of the outstanding social scientists studying sport, having written Sugarball: the American Game, the Dominican Dream and Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Loredos. He examines in this book the political, economic, and structured arrangements of baseball on a global scale. He is concerned with the world wide recruitment of foreign talent (29 percent of major leaguers in 2005 were foreign born) and also Major League Baseball’s self-promotion overseas to make money. Klein argues that MLB’s efforts at globalization are critical to its current and future prosperity because the domestic base for fans and players has receded, though in 2005, when he was writing the game was at an all time high in attendance.

Klein spent time with the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a big market team, the Kansas City Royals, a small market team, and Major League Baseball International, which is the commissioner’s agency to promote baseball around the world, and traveled to several countries to observe first-hand the work of MLBI.

MLBI is trying to deepen baseball’s roots where established, and foster interest elsewhere. MLBI divides its focus as baseball’s goodwill ambassador into three tiers: 1) countries where the game is well known like Japan, Dominican Republic, and Mexico; 2) countries with amateur or semiprofessional leagues like Italy, Australia, and Netherlands that it hopes to build up; and 3) teaching the game where it barely exists like England, Germany, and South Africa. MLB is looking to make money in tier 1 countries by selling broadcast rights (Japan paid $275 million for media rights), seeking corporate sponsorships, licensing products, and staging events. MLBI is working to build up grassroots programs in the other tiers in marginal success.

The interest of individual teams is to find and train foreign talent. The Dodgers build upon their traditions of hiring by merit, developing good relations with baseball people overseas, and with foreign-born fans living in Los Angeles. They spent heavily on player development, building excellent facilities in the Dominican Republic, and had major successes, bringing in Fernando Valenzuela and Hideo Nomo. The results have been less outstanding for Kansas City, which has to operate on the fringes, seeking the less expensive marginal players with potential.

Klein has additional chapters each on the Dominican Republic, Japan, the second tier Europeans, and third tier South Africa. He points out the strong support of the federal government in the Dominican Republic, where baseball bolsters the national image, and provides opportunity for impoverished youth, and the role of the buscon, who are agents that find and hone talent.

Klein recognizes that baseball is not making a lot of headway in areas of relative high influence and strong soccer traditions—in fact, the sport is being dropped by the Summer Olympics, while basketball has been much more successful. He suggests that baseball might be more successful making inroads by inventing traditions and tying into progressive social issues. I think he underplays the possibility that many places are uninterested in American baseball because they already have their own game, a reverse of the “why no soccer in the USA” argument, plus baseball is very complicated and difficult to play.