Abstract
Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice is a fascinating account of the ongoing transnationalization of baseball in the Dominican Republic (DR), as it chronicles the contentious relationship between Major League Baseball (MLB) and Dominican baseball over the past thirty years. Alan Klein tells an important story because Dominican baseball is today a major supplier of players to the MLB. This means, of course, that Dominican baseball, in turn, has changed dramatically as it responds to powerful MLB influences and demands. The plot of Klein’s story is structured around the concept of the global commodity chain. The transnational battle, then, is over the question of who should and will control Dominican player development, training, and contract negotiations, and by whom the island game should be regulated and managed. The story pits the powerful and mostly villainous figure of the MLB against the underdog Dominican buscones, the island’s baseball scouts and business wheeler-dealers. Klein’s achievement in telling the story this way is to highlight the point of view and interests of Dominican contenders for their piece of the baseball pie. This is, for North American readers, a largely unrepresented perspective, and as such makes a valuable contribution to the literature.
The story begins with an overview of the stages of development behind the production of MLB players. As MLB economic interests in Dominican baseball increased, the long and vibrant amateur tradition on the island weakened in favor of the more structured baseball academies. These academies, a key production site in the commodity chain, serve as a kind of holding tank for Dominicans, who receive needed game experience and, often, cultural “remediation” in preparation for rookie teams in the United States. Klein offers a richly textured account of how these academies came to be geographically centralized into a “local baseball production power house.” By means of thick description we learn how these cloistered environments socialize young boys, enhance their talents, eliminate undesirable traits, and offer instruction on American culture and language.
Between the MLB-sponsored baseball academies and the players are middlemen, the Dominican player trainer-scouts known as buscones, described as the only sovereign presence in the global production of Dominican players. Klein devotes two chapters to the full range of their contested work. A series of detailed portraits of trainers and other “cutting edge” Dominicans contrasts their deep investment in players and the game with that of their MLB equivalents. Dominican trainers often develop players over years, providing room and board, equipment, training, health care, transportation to home communities, intervention with family problems, and linguistic and cultural socialization. Since only a few of these sustained investments in players result in an MLB signing, when they do the informal Dominican standard is a 30 percent bonus for the buscón. The American scouting practice of taking only five percent looks better at face value, but it only covers their representation of the player at the time of signing, not years of care-taking. These sharply divergent investments in players are often unfairly portrayed in MLB discourse as evidence of gross Dominican exploitation. In fact, it seems that American media and the MLB have demonized the buscones as pimp-like hustlers in direct proportion to their increasing success in securing signing bonuses for their prospects. In contrast, on the island buscones are perceived as positive, nurturing developers of Dominican talent as well as outspoken defenders of Dominican interests.
In the book’s final gesture, Klein chronicles a series of heavy-handed efforts by the MLB to extend its local oversight of Dominican “problem areas” such as identity verification, marriage schemes, and steroid use. Klein asserts that these “problems” can be better understood as the “rational responses to circumstances rather than as instances of willful cheating for personal gain” (p. 134). An important turn of events in the battle was the appointment of Sandy Alderson by the MLB Commission to oversee a reform of Dominican baseball practices, armed with the threat of an international draft. At stake in these ongoing transnational power negotiations is the Dominican share of the baseball economic pie.
A central motivation of Klein’s book is to challenge ethnocentric appraisals of what Dominican baseball is really about and to undermine the legitimacy of the increasing MLB colonization of the island’s game. The book is particularly effective in unpacking and critiquing MLB’s self-presentation as the moral reformer of Dominican corruption. Many of Klein’s defenses of Dominican practices against MLB critiques are insightful and persuasive. For example, his argument that ethnocentric claims that the baseball industry exploits youth by enticing them to sacrifice a secure future by staying in school are ill-suited to the realities of the Dominican Republic, with its much lower returns of education on economic opportunity, is convincing.
Oddly, there is little systematic accounting of the ethnographic methods that at times seem to rely too heavily on a few strategic Dominican interviewees. Overall, however, Klein builds a convincing case for an empathetic understanding of the way local context structures the range of options for survival available to buscones, and for their economic politics. At the same time, Klein’s noble defense of all things Dominican sometimes stretches his reliability as a narrator, with facile equivalencies such as steroid use of Dominican sixteen-year-olds with aging American men’s use of low doses of testosterone.
One of the blind spots of the book is the lack of attention to the boys who are the objects of the struggles between Dominican and American economic interests. In order to tell his story of neocolonial resistance, the boys’ interests are assumed to be coterminous with those of their Dominican trainers. For example, we need not side with MLB interests to see that it is not in the long-term health interests of the boys to take steroids. Klein presents a kind of David and Goliath story between warriors: the underdog buscones, armed only with slingshots, do battle with the colonial Goliath of the MLB. Klein’s role in the story is to represent the untold story of Dominican resistance to Yankee occupation. This is a seductive plot, drawn with large gestures, but it consigns the players, families, and local communities to the role of bystanders, a standpoint that merited more methodological reflection in this otherwise persuasive and authoritative book.