Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice by Alan Klein (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice by Alan Klein Rob Ruck Alan Klein. Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 204 pp. Paper, $24.95. I cannot think of a more important or timely book about baseball in the Caribbean than Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice nor a better person to write it than Alan Klein. An anthropologist at Northeastern University, Klein has played a critical role in making the study of sport an accepted and well-regarded field in the United States. He writes lucidly and provocatively about larger theoretical and global questions but in a way that engages readers inside and outside the academy. I recently used his Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball in a graduate seminar and have slid Sugar-ball across my desk to many undergraduates interested in baseball. Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice bolsters Klein’s reputation as an unflinchingly honest and perceptive critic who has much to say about matters affecting sport and society. Klein explores the emergence of the Dominican Republic as Major League Baseball’s Caribbean mecca. The nation of 11 million people accounts for a tenth of all major leaguers and a third of those filling minor-league rosters. The source of the biggest and best wave of players since integration, it’s home to a disproportionate number of baseball’s top players. Most of these men came out of the academy system that began taking shape in the 1980s. Klein sketches baseball’s evolution on the island, tracing mlb’s gradual acceptance of darker-skinned Latinos after the color line crumbled. He then offers the best account yet of the growth of the academies and the role that buscones (baseball trainers cum entrepreneurs) have played in recruiting and developing young ballplayers. Along the way, Klein demolishes the mlb-centric perspective that casts Dominican baseball as an appendage of the [End Page 133] major leagues in which Dominicans are either powerless or ruthless outliers. Instead, he highlights the struggles and insurgencies defining island baseball and emphasizes that the struggle in Dominican baseball is a fight over power—over who controls and profits from the production of players. Many writers have parachuted into the Dominican Republic for a few days to write exposes about the abuses of the academy system or to celebrate a boy’s journey from the cane fields to the major leagues. But no writer or scholar other than Klein has spent as much time on the ground or earned the credibility that comes with repeated journeys and the ongoing display of good faith. And I doubt that any academic knows the world of Dominican baseball more intimately. Klein’s research is based on interviews and fieldwork conducted with informants he has known for decades. Because Dominican youth are not included in the annual mlb draft, they begin their professional careers as free agents. And because they cannot be signed until July 2 of the year they turn seventeen, many of them are recruited by buscones when they are as young as thirteen. These buscones train boys, often providing food, shelter, and medical care as they mature. The year a boy becomes eligible to sign, the buscon attempts to create a market for his services by showing off his talents to different organizations in hopes of driving up his signing bonus. In return, the buscon takes as much as 30 percent of the bonus. Some buscones are ethical and competent, able to help youth maximize their athletic potential and professional worth. Others are neither, encouraging boys to take performance-enhancing drugs or lie about their ages. But the buscones, who number in the hundreds, have become an integral part of the player- development system. Klein distinguishes between the efforts of Dominican and US buscones, as well as between ramshackle and highly capitalized operations. He has ventured deeply enough within this confusing system to identify its contradictions and to see the niches where small operators survive by selling boys to well-heeled competitors. While not attempting to rehabilitate the buscon or overlook those who have damaged youth, Klein counters their often sensationalized characterization as Faginesque traffickers in youth...