Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (review)

Integration profoundly transformed professional baseball in the Americas, eliminating the single-most significant barrier to participation to all African Americans and the majority of Latinos. While Jackie Robinson's breaking of organized baseball's Jim Crow system of race-based exclusion remains one of baseball history's more chronicled moments, fewer fans are aware of how Robinson and the integration pioneers who followed were inserted into a broader, transnational process, wherein MLB sought to secure dominance over foreign baseball circuits and in talent acquisition. It is this understudied subject that is historian Rob Ruck's focus in illuminating "how the Major Leagues colonized the Black and Latin game."

Raceball wonderfully fuses Ruck's decades of research and writing on Negro League baseball and Dominican baseball to provide a comprehensive study of what can be called the baseball world in the Americas. One can scarcely find a better scholar than Ruck to critically examine the reverberations felt throughout this baseball world by Branch Rickey's launching of baseball's "great experiment" and the subsequent complications wrought by the peculiar manner Major League Baseball (MLB) officials pursued the incorporation of the previously racially excluded. His incisive argument enables readers to better comprehend that this baseball world made new was one where many of the economic and social practices that sustained organized baseball's color line continued to shape relations between Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues, and Latino baseball.

The author executes an important analytical move in Raceball to construct his argument about the hegemonic order MLB strove to establish within the baseball world. Instead of focusing on just organized baseball and claiming to tell the story of baseball, race, and integration, Ruck widens the analytical lens to include the Negro Leagues along with the Mexican, Cuban, and Dominican circuits as central locations to this story. Importantly, Ruck moves with great facility between the Caribbean, the Negro Leagues, and the Mexican circuits, analyzing how MLB and team officials too often acted with an imperial-like abandon. Yet, Ruck does not lose sight of the other part of the story. Black ball served as a "cultural counterpoint to the discrimination African Americans encountered at work and in politics," he observes in speaking of the Negro Leagues' importance to the black community in the United States (28). He likewise notes that it was the Latin American leagues (and not the majors) that first revealed that "black baseball's Achilles heel would be its helplessness to rebuff efforts by better financed leagues seeking its most precious assets-players" (58).

Ruck's historically crafted analysis brings together the story of organized baseball's racial integration with that of the MLB's quest for dominance within the greater baseball world. Thus, although a radical departure from previous MLB racial practices, Ruck positions readers to also consider how Branch Rickey's uncompensated acquisition of Jackie Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs was part of a well-worn tradition of MLB officials. That tradition involved attempts to expand the talent pool, all the while dictating the terms of that talent's inclusion. Ruck demonstrates how this effort was not limited to labor relations within organized baseball, but rather also in the relation between MLB and the major professional circuits elsewhere in the Americas.

The effort by MLB to locate new sources of talent and to acquire that talent as cheaply as possible, all the while attempting to incorporate these new markets into its organizational structure, is central to Ruck's thesis about a particular form of colonization transpiring within the baseball world in the Americas. The Major Leagues' increased acquisition of Latin American talent in the ten-year span preceding Jackie Robinson's 1945 signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers illustrates Ruck's central argument about the colonization of Black and Latino baseball. On the one hand, MLB owners were able to fend off the Jorge Pasquel-led Mexican League pursuit of white American and Latino...