Alan Klein is a Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at Northeastern University who has published extensively on the intersections of sport, economy, politics and culture among Dominicans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and North Americans. Sugarball was his first book-length project, an investigation of baseball in the Dominican Republic, which since the 1950s has been a regular and frequent supplier of high caliber baseball talent to the US professional league.
In an Appendix Klein reviews his approach to data collection, which included extended periods of residence in Dominican baseball camps observing and interviewing managers, coaches, and players, teaching English classes to prospects, and following players home on weekends to witness their home life. He also engaged in observation at Dominican ballparks, interviewed fans, and surveyed baseball coverage in the local press. He does not comment on his Spanish ability except to note that he was sometimes required to carry out interviews in Spanish and occasionally act as translator. Taken together with his survey of local newspapers, this suggests a high level of fluency.
As an academic, Klein was not writing simply to celebrate Dominican baseball, though his love for the people and their version of the game is evident. His intention was to test a thesis and prove a point about baseball in DR, namely that the game has not been not merely a game, but a vehicle through which a complex economic and political relationship has been maintained with the world, most specifically the United States. While the Japanese have also operated in the country in the scouting and recruiting of baseball talent, little is written of that here (but might make an interesting tri-cultural investigation into how the Japanese compete with the Americans for Latin players).
What he discovered is that baseball talent in Dominica has been much like any other export. The dominant power, the USA, controls the terms of the trade, favoring its own needs over those from whom the product is extracted. In the case of Dominica, this has resulted in the retardation of its own game as the best players are skimmed off and sent overseas.
When this relationship began rather informally in the 1950s, the Americans pushed the Dominicans to move their baseball schedule from summer to winter so that their seasons would not overlap. Dominican acquiescence resulted in a regular flow of traffic between the two countries, with Dominican professionals playing in the USA in the summer, and many American professionals, as well as their returning Dominican teammates, playing in the Dominican winter leagues. But with the advent of free agency and the million dollar salaries that followed, many US teams would no longer allow their players to work in DR, including even their Dominican players, for fear of losing their high-priced labor to injury.
By the late 1980s, when the research for this book was conducted, recruitment had become more systematic, as had the repercussions on Dominican baseball. American teams to this day still run their own academies where local talent can be sequestered and developed for eventual deployment to the US leagues. This crippled Dominican amateur leagues, which had to compete for talent with the likes of the Toronto Blue Jays, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Quite naturally in a country with a severely underdeveloped economy, talent migrated to where it could make the most money, even though most talent would in fact never make it to the US or secure a million-dollar contract.
Klein has also demonstrated how baseball is a vehicle for contesting US hegemony, a space in which Dominicans have been able to openly challenge, engage, and even defeat those that depredate their own expression of the game. He highlights Dominicans’ conflicted feelings toward US baseball, on the one hand resenting its power and interference, on the other envious of its glamour and wealth and wishing for themselves or their children to profit from it.
Finally, there is an excellent closing chapter on life at Dominica’s most famous baseball stadium in which Klein describes the people working there (from vendors to gambling touts), the behavior of fans, and the atmosphere of a typical game.
Although an academic text, Sugarball is largely jargon free and easily accessible to an educated reader. The book was published in 1991 based on research carried out in the 1980s. An updated account is provided in Klein’s 2014 book, Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice. The title suggests that though there is now more talent to celebrate, not much may have changed in the underlying conditions of Dominica’s relationship to US professional baseball.
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