Mexican baseball seems like a tremendously rich field of inquiry, both the sport and the wider culture in which it thrives. This is one of the few English texts on the subject, and I’m sad to say it leaves much to be desired. It is quite obviously a vanity project, available to audiences outside the Yucatan only through the author, who twelve years after it was published is still fulfilling orders from Mexico or through her family in the USA. Contact details are provided below.
Kalmon is an American expat in Meridia, home to one of Mexico’s professional baseball teams, the Los Leones de Yucatan. She writes in colloquial North American English, a conversational style similar to a blog post. Like many blogs, the text is presented for the consumption of a small circle of intimates. She telegraphs her intention early:
This book is about what my friends -Lorna Gail, Trudy, Greg, Charlotte-and I experienced, shared, shouted, and even ate during the 2005 season at Kukulcan Stadium.
Her account is largely impressionistic. She writes about what she saw, who she met, what she did. Some of her experiences may be generalizable, but in the absence of information about the experiences of others, there is no way to know. The most frustrating thing about her book is the lack of background material. Her impressions are not supported by her own research or that of others and leaves the reader questioning its value.
The author uses a parallel chapter structure alternating chronological reviews of the Leones’ wins and losses across the 2005 season, and topical chapters focusing on such things as stadium food and between-inning entertainment. The chronological chapters are quite repetitive in structure and content. Here is an example:
Then we started the season's second half at home, facing teams from the northern division. Our first opponent was Los Potros (the Colts) from Tijuana. In the first game the Colts proved no match for Rayo, still hot from the all-star game, and our catcher Said Gutienez. Said was responsible for three of our seven runs. Rayo had two hits and three stolen bases, and was now leading the league with thirty-six steals on the season. Oscar Rivera was four wins, four losses, and was named Player of the Week in the Mexican league for his pitching performance.
Imagine this going on and on, paragraph after paragraph. It’s like reading someone’s notes. What’s missing is any kind of contextualization, such as player backgrounds and recent team history. Readers need to know who the characters are and something about the world they inhabit in order to engage in their journey. Mostly all we get are names, positions, length of service with the Leones, and perhaps a performance stat or two.
The topical chapters are far more interesting but lack depth. The author seems to have personally eaten her way through a large selection of stadium food and so can offer useful descriptions of them all. What’s missing is any sort of inquiry into how these foods came to be sold at baseball games, recent food trends, or the economics of food vending. The same is true on the subject of between-inning entertainment: Why these types of games? These kinds of dances? How are these people recruited? Do they stay for more than a season? How much are they paid? A chapter on fans is similarly impressionistic with no effort to find out more about them, their frequency of attendance, their socioeconomic background, or their level of fan involvement. The chapter on superstition is little more than a laundry list of peculiar behavior with no effort to understand why. (For an idea on how these topics can be covered more systematically, see Gmelch’s In the ballpark: The working lives of baseball people, or Inside Pitch: Life In Professional Baseball.)
There are a number of other missed opportunities. At one point in her account, she mentions “vocal young men who are at nearly every game equipped with drums and horns, and led by a self-appointed cheerleader.” Who are they? How are these associations formed? Are they supported in any way by team owners? She mentions that the Leones include two players from Venezuela, without mentioning how common it might be for Mexican teams to recruit from outside Mexico, if Venezuelan players are particularly prized, or problems expat Latin players might have adjusting to the Mexican league. She notes in passing a game being cancelled because of electricity problems at the stadium. How frequently does this happen?
And then there are the obvious misses, such as pausing (in a baseball book) to define ERA, a gratuitous chapter on the author’s experience of baseball as a child (which seems to confirm findings that North American females are typically invited to play in male youth games only when there are a surfeit of male players; see Cohen’s No girls in the clubhouse), and inserting references to current events that have no connection to the story (such as the death of Terri Schiavo).
A collection of photos provides clarification to some of the text descriptions, such as the costumes of dancers, or food vendors in action, but the size and quality of the reproduction leaves much to be desired. Photos of on-field action were clearly shot from within the stands without the requisite lenses and are not always well-framed or cropped and add little to our understanding of the game.
Spanish readers may be interested to find the book has been published as a bilingual manuscript.
Hard copies may be ordered through Julia Kamon at kalmonjulia@yahoo.com. When I purchased mine, payment could be made only through check. Credit cards and PayPal were not accepted.
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