The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [97]
No one is certain why this is happening. It is sometimes suggested that it is because the route to a high-paying position is considerably faster for an NFL or NBA player than for a professional baseball player. Football and basketball do not have minor leagues. They bring their players up through college programs, and college stars seamlessly move to being high-paid professionals without putting in a few low-paying and humbling years in the minors.
But there is a broader problem. Americans in general are losing interest in baseball. The fans are getting older and older, and young people are dramatically less interested. Hundreds of Little League programs have closed.
Fred Cambria, a former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who has coached major-league and college players and often runs clinics for urban boys wanting to develop baseball skills, said, “I see the Latino player being dominant for the upcoming years. They are great athletes, they work hard from an early age.” He was not saying that African-Americans would not work hard but that they were poor people who found more economic incentive in other sports. “There’s no scholarships for baseball players in colleges, so they go to the revenue sports—football and basketball,” he explained. “You get a small amount of scholarship money and you have to divide it up, and a black kid needs a full ride. So now there are not enough heroes for them to look up to in baseball.”
Cambria sees the urban programs struggling. Revitalizing Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) was supposed to develop urban baseball players. “RBI is trying to get African-Americans to play, and it’s very very difficult. Inner city programs are closing,” he said. But it is not a problem only with African-Americans: Americans in general seem to be losing interest in baseball. Cambria lives in the largely white, middle-class Long Island town of Northport, where, he said, “ninety percent of the kids play soccer or lacrosse and the baseball diamonds are empty.”
Major League Baseball now has thirty teams and needs 750 active players. They also need more fans and more television contracts in the world to bring in the revenue to pay all of these enormous salaries. Major League Baseball has become a huge international corporation. There is even a division called Major League Baseball International that focuses on expanding baseball in the world.
None of this is good news for Dominicans. When a few innovators such as the Dodgers and Giants and Blue Jays went looking abroad for new talent, the Dominican Republic easily dominated their attention. It still does, but now there are programs to develop players all over the world—not just in Latin America and Asia but in Australia, where the first recorded game was in Melbourne in 1857; in Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa, where it has been played since the 1930s; and even Great Britain, although the British are not being easily lured.
Even within Latin America it is getting more competitive. Major League Baseball has become particularly interested in Nicaragua, a country that in recent years has edged out the Dominican Republic for the distinction of being the second-poorest nation in the Americas. The unassailably poorest, Haiti, seems too convulsed in its own tragedy for baseball. And inevitably the day will come when the United States government will make peace with Cuba and stop requiring Cubans to desert their country—that is to say, defect—if they want to work in the United States. Once the U.S. allows Cubans