Book review: Block, I. (2018). Cuba Loves Baseball: A Photographic Journey.

Block, I. (2018). Cuba Loves Baseball: A Photographic Journey. 1st ed. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.

Ira Block began his career as a newspaper photographer in the 1970s and has since published widely, including in National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.  According to his notes, this book project began in 2013 as an attempt to document as many facets of Cuban baseball as possible before the opening of the country erased Castro-era culture. To some degree Block has succeeded.  Of the 104 images, there are scenes of children playing street ball, as well as adults in neighborhood and industrial leagues. We see curious ticket vendors and enthusiastic fans, street-side food stalls, baseball-themed graffiti and advertising, restaurants and bars decorated with baseball paraphernalia, and monuments to fans and players in stadiums and in cemeteries.  Perhaps the most touching images within this collection are portraits of men in their 60s and 70s who have continued to play baseball and pose as if they are still in their 20s.  What sets these portraits apart is not only the subject matter (they appear to be the only staged images in the book) but the quality of the images, made by someone with developed technical and interpersonal skills.  Unfortunately, the remainder of the photographs are not terribly striking (in either content or aesthetics) and would benefit greatly from contextualization.  Who are these people? Why are they here? How much of their lives and energy is given to their pursuit? What are their perceptions of the activities depicted here? The images are evidence of a surface-level ethnography, the kind any seasoned traveler could make without having to speak with the photographic subject.  There are a couple of introductory essays, but they are so general as to be largely uninformative.  Still, the book is worth a look and in the absence of any substantial text, the investment of time to review 100 images is not high.

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Exploring Korean baseball online

Previous posts on a recent baseball visit to Korea included planning and logistics in addition to reviews of stadiums.  Here I provide resources for your own online exploration of Korea baseball.

The Korean Baseball Organization website features schedules, standings, rosters, stats, and links to each of the league's ten team websites.  

Jamsil, Gochoek, and Munhak: Seoul's baseball stadiums

From top: Jamsil, Gocheok, Munhak

Having just returned from a long weekend in Seoul featuring three baseball games at three stadiums, I provide here a brief review of those venues.  A post outlining planning and travel considerations can be found here.

Three days, three stadiums, three games, six teams: a baseball weekend in Seoul

Thinking of visiting Korea for baseball?  Read on.

The goal was as many games as possible in as many stadiums as possible within a three-day weekend.

Film Review: Sugar. (2008). [film] Directed by A. Boden and R. Fleck.

Sugar. (2008). [film] Directed by A. Boden and R. Fleck. US: HBO Films.

Sugar can sometimes be found in lists of baseball movies, but it is more a story about personal discovery, of learning how to manage life, than it is about baseball.

Anyone wishing to explore the background to Sugar would do well to look into the work of anthropologist Alan Klein, who has published widely on the socio-political-economic aspects of Dominican baseball. With an island-wide network of academies in which young boys are housed and trained for eventual export to the United States, the DR has become a regular and consistent source of inexpensive labor for Major League Baseball.  But for every Sammy Sosa or David Ortiz who signs a multimillion dollar big league contract, thousands of aspirants never make it past the minor leagues.  A touching montage of these now grown men closes out the film, which includes Sugar, our protagonist, a young man whose story highlights the trajectory of many Dominicans brought to the United States to play baseball.

Film Review: Pelotero. (2011).

Pelotero (2011). [film] Directed by R. Finkel and T. Martin. USA: Makuhari Media.

The great thing about Pelotero is the immediacy.  The camera seems to be there for many of the most important scenes and gives the film a sense of presence, as if the viewer were there to witness these tangled and frustrating negotiations.  MLB was reportedly not happy with the film.  Then commissioner Bud Selig is said to have called the producers, which included then Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, to complain about unfair treatment.  Valentine is reported as replying to the effect that the camera simply documented what transpired and if as a result the MLB looks bad, that’s MLB’s fault.

The object of the camera’s focus is a pair of 16-year old Dominican baseball players, pelotero in Spanish, as they perform in tryouts for MLB scouts and prepare to negotiate contracts they hope will launch their families out of poverty.  Dominica has been an attractive source of labor for MLB for the past two decades because, as more than one person remarks in the documentary, it can take advantage of the country’s political and economic weakness to recruit cheap labor. The fly in the MLB’s ointment is the buscone, Dominican coaches who groom talent and act as player agents in contract negotiations, resulting often in million-dollar signing bonuses.

Book review: Mitchell, L. (2016). Will Big League Baseball Survive?: Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball.

Mitchell, L. (2016). Will Big League Baseball Survive?: Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

If you ever wondered what political consultants get paid for, Will Big League Baseball Survive? might prove enlightening, not so much for what it says about baseball, but for how the author applies his research and analytical skills to sport.  Mitchell Lincoln is an American consultant and political analyst with a PhD from Columbia University.  He has been published widely in US mainstream media and has written three books on politics and democracy in the former Soviet Union and East Bloc countries.

His baseball book is something like a SWOT analysis, an acronym business students will recognize as a commonly used interpretive device: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.  SWOT offers a business a snapshot of current operations in terms of what it already does well, where it is failing, how it might improve, and who or what it needs to worry about. Mitchell doesn’t structure his book in quite this way, but the concept (or something like it) is implicit in the discussion.

Film Review: Los Pequenos Gigantes. (1960).

Los Pequenos Gigantes. (1960). [film] Directed by H. Butler. Mexico: Classa Films Mundial.

Los Pequenos Gigantes (The Little Giants) tells the story of the 1957 Little League World Series champions, a team from Monterrey, Mexico, the first from outside the United States to take home that trophy.  Filmed in Mexico and the US two years after the events it depicts, the movie is unusual for featuring the children and coach as actors playing themselves.  While poor performances might be expected, in fact the only cringe-worthy turn comes from the team’s American-expat “manager,” who speaks in tin-eared English-accented Spanish. The boys do a fine job representing themselves, as does the coach, the drama’s central character, whose background and motivations unfold slowly and provide a drama within the larger drama.

The film is unusual in a couple of other ways.  The director and co-author of the screenplay, Hugo Butler, was an academy-award nominated screenwriter who served in the US military in World War II before falling victim to America's post-war Communist witch-hunt.  Blacklisted in Hollywood, he moved to Mexico and worked on a number of projects such as this, as well as teaming-up with another expatriate filmmaker, one of the world’s great auteurs, Luis Buñuel. In putting this film together, Butler was able to take liberal advantage of stock footage featuring his actors, such as clips from real games, a meeting at the White House with President Dwight Eisenhower, the homecoming airport reception and parade in Monterey, and a meeting with Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.

Butler avoids sentimentality and jingoism and in his presentation of themes of purpose, resolve, resilience, camaraderie, and national pride is deliberately understated. This stands in contrast to the excessively melodramatic English-language Disney remake (The Perfect Game, 2008), featuring a cast of children seemingly wise beyond their years.  For a more sensitive and genuine presentation of this story, seek out Los Pequenos Gigantes.

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Book Review: Gmelch, G. and Nathan, D. (2017). Baseball Beyond Our Borders: An International Pastime.

Gmelch, G. and Nathan, D. (2017). Baseball Beyond Our Borders: An International Pastime. 1st ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Baseball Beyond Our Borders is a revised version of Baseball Without Borders, a 2006 anthology of sixteen essays on the game as manifested in fourteen countries (listed below).  Writers were given the opportunity to develop their own interests and approaches and as a result the reader is treated to everything from encyclopedia-like historical overviews, to first-person research accounts, to political analysis of international baseball labor markets.  Most readers are sure to find something they like, as well as something they don’t.

The new book features updates on the previously published work, as well as eight new essays focusing on several countries where baseball is a niche sport, and unlikely, as the writer on New Zealand concludes, of “becoming anything more than a relatively minor sport with a passionate following.” Tasmania is included here, it seems, because one of the editors did some academic field work on the island unrelated to baseball.  While South Africa and Israel have made appearances in the quadrennial World Baseball Classic (WBC), and Israel has moved up in world rankings, the sport in those countries remains of marginal interest to most residents or citizens, and in Finland hardly exists at all.  Readers are instead treated to perhaps one of the more offbeat and interesting essays in this collection, an introduction to pesäpallo, an invented game based on baseball, but very different from it.

A new essay on the WBC brings the book to a sobering close. While many readers might imagine the WBC as a grand assembly of nations in celebration of the game, Robert Elias suggests (as does William W. Kelly in his chapter on Japan) that it functions instead as a global stage on which to promote Major League Baseball, as well as a venue for showcasing non-US talent that can afterwards be brought (more appropriately, bought) into the MLB fold.  Rather than internationalizing baseball, MLB is using WBC to internationalize its brand.

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Countries, states and territories covered (essays new to the 2017 version in bold): Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela; China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan; Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania; Israel; South Africa; Finland, Great Britain, Holland, Italy; World Baseball Classic.

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Book review: Weber, B. (2009). As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires

Weber, B. (2009). As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires. New York: Scribner.

Recently retired, Bruce Weber was a New York Times reporter who thought it would be fun to write a story about schools that train umpires for professional baseball.  He was not a sports writer – his background is in theatre and the arts – but he had some personal interest in the game and a willingness to explore, so he spent a few days at Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring observing, and thereafter published his first writing on baseball (“The Inner Ump”).  His curiosity piqued, he researched and wrote two more articles, one in which he travelled with a Double A umpiring crew as they worked small ball parks across the US midwest (“Minor League Umpires Wait for the Big Call”), and the other in which he visited big league stadiums to observe and interview Bruce Froemming, then the senior umpire in the major leagues (“Umpire Revels in the Calls, and in Getting Them Right”).