The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [96]
Macorisanos and Dominicans have reason to worry. The American press eagerly picks up any whiff of such scandals, because in America the idea that there is something less than proper about all these foreign and wild “Latins” getting into baseball has considerable resonance. Foreign is generally not a positive adjective in the United States. In 1987 pitcher Kevin Gross got caught illegally creating an odd movement in his pitch by means of a sticky substance that he hid in his glove. Accused of slipping a foreign substance on the ball, he denied the charge by protesting, “Everything I used on it is from the good old U.S.A.”
The fact that more and more players are not from the good old U.S.A. is not popular in America. This author wrote a cover story in Parade magazine in July 2007 about baseball in San Pedro de Macorís and the magazine received more than one hundred letters from readers. Most complained that there were too many foreigners, too many Latins, or too many Dominicans in baseball. Baseball, after all, was an American sport and the top players should be American. In the nineteenth century, the great American poet Walt Whitman, definer of things American, called baseball “America’s game,” said it had “the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere,” and even compared it in significance to the Constitution. While Major League Baseball is seeking to internationalize the game, many Americans want to keep it uniquely American.
Much of the criticism comes from African-Americans. It is undeniable that the number of black players has declined precipitously just as the number of Latino players, the majority of whom are Dominican, has risen. After Jackie Robinson, the number of African-American players steadily climbed until 1975, when it reached twenty-five percent: one in four major leaguers. By 2005, black Americans represented only 9.5 percent of major-league players. At the same time, almost one in three major leaguers was foreign born. That number seemed certain to rise. Dominicans alone made up about a quarter of all minor leaguers.
Not only fans but some African-American players have been outspoken about this, most notably the great hitter Gary Sheffield. Sheffield claimed that Major League Baseball was favoring Latin players because they could be acquired more cheaply and were easier to control. “Where I’m from, you can’t control us,” said Sheffield. “You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that’s a person that you’re going to talk to with respect, you’re going to talk to like a man.”
That Latinos are easy to control would come as a revelation to anyone who had worked with George Bell or Joaquín Andújar. But it was true that Dominican ballplayers came to the U.S. with a terror of being released and shipped back to the cane fields. Ironically this was the exact same logic that had made the American sugar companies prefer imported cocolos, thinking that fear of being shipped back would make them easier to control than Dominican laborers. As for getting Latin players more cheaply, even Dominicans, including Sammy Sosa and Manny Alexander, publicly acknowleged—complained—that drafted American rookies got more money than Dominican prospects. That was certainly true of Sosa and Alexander. But top Dominican prospects in the twenty-first century were landing signing bonuses that strongly suggested that baseball’s interest in Dominican players was not about getting them cheaply.
A careful study of the evidence suggests that Major League