Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

11. Brazil: Baseball Is Popular, and the Players Are Japanese!

11 | Brazil Baseball Is Popular, and the Players Are Japanese! ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ For the better part of its first century, Major League Baseball players were predominantly from the United States, with only a handful having learned their skills in a few neighboring countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.1 Since the s, however , one country after another has made its presence in : Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Curaçao, and, further afield, Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Indeed, today’s Major Leaguers come from nineteen different countries. This chapter documents the emergence of a new countryBrazil —into the spectrum of professional baseball, one that is surprising in many ways. What is unique about Brazil’s emergence in professional baseball can be expressed in three observations: . Baseball (beisebol) has developed in a country that is the leader in the world’s most popular sport—soccer. . Baseball has developed into a major sport with almost no input from the United States. . Virtually all of the players from this country are of Japanese heritage; in effect the game has been imported from Japan. Although baseball is a long way from becoming as popular as football (or soccer, as it is called in North America), the expansion of baseball has been an interesting cultural phenomenon. As one looks at the development of baseball throughout the world, often the introduction of the game can be traced to the pres- Baseball Is Popular, and the Players Are Japanese! ence of players from the United States. But we also see some evidence of baseball being exported to neighboring countries without the direct influence of U.S. baseball. As Michael and May Oleksak note in their recent study, Beisbol: Latin Americans and the Grand Old Game,“It was the Cubans’ fight for independence from Spain during the last two decades of the s that spurred the game’s migration during this violent period. . . . Some [Cubans] went east to the Dominican Republic, while more headed west to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.”2 In both cases , though introduced by immigrant Cubans, the game soon took root among citizens of the receiving country. (The first Mexican national to appear in the U.S. Major Leagues was Melo Almada in . Dominican players were largely prohibited because of the color barrier, so that the first Dominican, Ozzie Virgil Sr., did not make his first appearance until .) In Asia the emergence of baseball is largely attributed to the popularity of the game in Japan, going back over a century ago. Originally introduced by Americans, baseball spread from Japan to Korea and Taiwan. In Brazil, as we will demonstrate, the development of baseball is tied to the immigrant Japanese. The game exists in Brazil primarily because of its popularity in the Japanese community; indeed in the early days of Japanese immigration, the community was held together in part because of its love for baseball. Brazil the Country It has often been said that people in the United States have a limited worldview and limited understanding of the nature of other societies. As U.S. president George W. Bush once said to the president of Brazil, “Do you have blacks, too?” Certainly knowledge of Brazil is limited in U.S. society. The United States dominates the North American continent in much the same way that Brazil dominates the South American continent. Brazil is larger in land area than the contiguous U.S. states and has a population of , , , only percent smaller than the U.S. population . São Paulo is either the third or the fifth largest city in the world, depending on how one counts (either . million or . million). ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ Southern Brazil tends to be the economic engine of the country while the North is poorer and less industrialized. It is in the more affluent South that baseball has flourished. First Appearance of Baseball in Brazil The first record of baseball being played in Brazil was in the early twentieth century, about the same time that it appeared in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. It was originally played in Brazil by employees of U.S. companies who were in the country for short-term projects. Despite the interest of the U.S. visitors, the game did not take hold among Brazilian citizens, who were already enthralled by football (soccer). As Celia Abe Oi notes, baseball was introduced by employees of American companies, particularly an...