Playing with the Lines

Abstract

In 1935, Roberto Bobby Estalella signed a contract to play baseball for the Washington Senators. Estalella was from Cuba, and for the financially tightfisted Senators' owner Clark Griffith, this worked to his advantage. Players from the Caribbean were talented, cheap, and plentiful. Major league teams did not even have to pay them a signing bonus. However, Estalella came with a hitch. His complexion was, in the words of Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich, swarthy, his hair dark and curly. During the Jim Crow era, when baseball held firmly to a barring African Americans from playing, was Estalella going to be accepted as white? Was he actually breaking the color line twelve years before Jackie Robinsons celebrated debut with the Dodgers in 1947? If so, how did he get away with it? Organized baseballs color line was never written down anywhere as a legally binding contract, so the test of whether a player would be accepted was how he was treated by fans, opponents, teammates, and the press. According to them, did he pass? As Adrian Burgos Jr. argues in his valuable new book Playing Game, these kinds of questions are not just about baseball, but about racial knowledge. They are questions that sports writers, players, fans, league officials, radio talk show hosts, and casual observers all asked, and still ask, about the participation of Latinos in Americas Game. As such, they illustrate how the story of Latino inclusion and exclusion from baseball is connected to larger, ongoing processes of racial formation in the United States how game of baseball is historically interwoven with race game. Burgos's book at first appears to be about the place of Latinos with regard to baseball's color line, but it is also about how playing America's Game is about boundaries of race that extend beyond the baseball diamond and that intersect color lines in the beyond the boundaries of the United States. Burgos's work is part of an emerging body of sports scholarship that connects the study of sports to cultural categories and meanings. Like music, literature,