Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game

Abstract

A worthy successor to his impressive studies of the history of African American and Dominican baseball, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (1987) and The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (1991), Rob Ruck's new book beautifully blends the intertwined histories of African American and Latin baseball, and their usually ill-fated interactions with Major League Baseball (MLB). Ruck builds on the work of Roberto González Echevarría (The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball, 1999) and Adrian Burgos (Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, 2007) to paint a fascinating picture of baseball in the early twentieth-century Caribbean. He recasts conventional notions of baseball history by showing how, in the decades before World War I, Havana became the hub of an international baseball culture, “the only place in the world where the best professional ballplayers of all nations and colors competed with and against each other” (p. 1). Players in the Negro leagues banned from the major leagues commonly played winter ball in the Caribbean—in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Mexico—until the early 1940s, along with many white big leaguers supplementing their incomes during the off-season. Cuban teams, many of them reinforced with stars from the Negro leagues, beat the white major leaguers so frequently that MLB banned teams from playing under their own names, to avoid embarrassment.