Book Review: Balukjian, Brad. The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball’S Afterlife. 2020.

Balukjian, Brad. The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball’S Afterlife. 1st ed., University Of Nebraska Press, 2020.

I probably should have read a sample chapter.

The concept is intriguing, a road-trip across the USA to interview former MLB players to inquire about their transition to life outside baseball.  (The conceit of the book title is that subject selection was based on players in a pack of 1986 baseball cards.)  Almost as much as the idea is engaging, though, its execution is disappointing.

Lindbergh, B. and Miller, S. (2017). The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

Lindbergh, B. and Miller, S. (2017). The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.

This is a gracious account of two nerdy statheads learning firsthand the difficulty of applying sabermeteric theory to real-life baseball.  Invited by a new owner to put their ideas where their mouths are, the 30-something writers for Baseball Prospectus join the Sonoma Stompers, a club in one of professional baseball’s lowest ranking leagues, and are given carte blanche to run whatever crazy experiments about which they have ever fantasized, including in this account the first deployment in professional baseball of a five-man infield. 

Unlike their fantasy baseball clubs, though, where they can move players around at will, the writers discover that in real life real people with real emotional lives often make implementing experiments difficult, if not sometimes impossible.  Bringing change to the clubhouse, to the dugout, and to the field is fraught with all the complications of making changes in the office. It’s not enough to have clever ideas about baseball.  To make effective change requires understanding how to manage human needs and desires, to be able to read and anticipate how the actors in the drama may react and finding ways to convince them that your cause is their cause.  (Another stathead author and professional psychologist (reviewed here), makes a guest appearance to offer advice on bonding.) As in any such projects, there are successes and failures.  The writers are brave enough not to gloss over their own mistakes nor to claim all the credit, which makes this a very refreshing read, a very real drama about learning and living graciously.  The writing is sharp and crisp, though I never could distinguish different authorial voices.  The writers take turns writing alternating chapters, but you’d never know it if they hadn’t said so.  Even so, this is one of the better baseball books I’ve read. Highly recommended. 

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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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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”).

Book review: Kalmon, J. (2007). Magic, Miracles, and Mexican Baseball: The Amazing 2005 Season of Los Leones de Yucatan.

Kalmon, J. (2007). Magic, Miracles, and Mexican Baseball: The Amazing 2005 Season of Los Leones de Yucatan. 1st ed. Merida, Mexico: Self-published.

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:

Book review: Morris, P. (2007). Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball.

Morris, P. (2007). Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Modern readers may take it for granted that the playing fields of professional baseball stadiums all look pretty much the same. It wasn’t always that way. Home field advantage once meant more than being in familiar surroundings supported by loyal fans. It could also mean knowing where the furrows were under the tall grass, or that you could safely bunt because the foul lines had been molded to keep balls in play. Such were the conditions of play at the turn of the 20th century. How we got from there to here, though the lives of two landscaping brothers, is the ostensible arc of Morris’ book. It sounds inviting, and offers quite a lot of detail of interest, but in the end is a history that reveals how little we actually know.

Morris is something of a prolific baseball researcher and writer, with five other books to his name, most published in the first decade of the 2000s. His directness and clarity make for easy reading. Unfortunately, his subject is not well represented in the literature and Morris is repeatedly left to speculating, both on his subjects, and on many causes of changes to landscaping practices.

Book review: Withers, E. (2005). Negro League Baseball: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers. 2005.

Withers, E. (2005). Negro League Baseball: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers. 1st ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

When Ernest C Withers returned to Memphis after service in WWII, he decided to set up his own commercial photography business.  He had started practicing while in high school, improved his skills in the military, and hoped as a civilian to serve his community taking photos of whatever might be needed.  He shot weddings, funerals, church and school functions, portraits, business openings – anything and everything to help his business grow and support his wife and eight children.  In this book’s introductory essay by Daniel Wolff, Withers notes he was no baseball fanatic.  If a better paying job was available, he wouldn’t be found at the ballpark.

But the ballpark was not without its financial rewards.  In the 1940s, baseball was perhaps the largest black owned business in the United States and Withers found a way to make himself useful to the Martin family, owners of the Memphis Red Sox, providing baseball images for publicity posters, calendars, and newspapers. When he wasn’t busy elsewhere, Withers was at Martin’s Stadium, where he was not only an image maker, but also a retailer of pictures of teams, players, and even spectators.

For the Martin family and the owners of Negro League baseball teams, Withers’ photos were vital proof of the capability of the African American community.  Images depicting contract signings in well-appointed offices, teams in pressed white uniforms, and players riding shiny team busses were evidence that African Americans could be as successful as their white counterparts.

Book review: Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.

Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This is not a suitable introductory text to the origins of baseball.  Readers without the appropriate background will very quickly find themselves wading through a veritable sea of names, dates, claims and counterclaims, much of it presented out of chronological sequence, and a fair portion made of up of extensive extracts from primary documents.

The book opens at the turn of the 20th century with a commission tasked with tracing the origins of baseball.  Thorn then moves in and out of narratives, back and forth across this point in time, to examine the commission’s collected documents and determine what was overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored, in reaching the now debunked claims for baseball having been invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York.  It’s an interesting tale, and Thorn has obviously done his research, but this is clearly a book for those who might have a stake in the story, or how it is told.  A book, in other words, for historians and researchers.

Book review: Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1997.

Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Though published twenty years ago, this study remains intriguing and perhaps instructive in how to operate sport franchises across cultural and national divides.  It tells the story of Los Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos), a Mexican baseball team that from the mid-1980s to early 1990s represented bordering cities in Mexico and the United States.  The team split its home schedule between a Mexican and American stadium, and as is typical of Mexican league teams, featured a number of American players on its roster.  Shortly after completing research for this book, the binational project collapsed.  Writer/researcher Alan Klein explains this failure largely in terms of structure.  Owners and managers were entirely Mexican and employed a largely conservative philosophy:  field a good team and attendance and finances would take care of themselves.  No one on the Mexican side seemed to understand the Tecolotes as a cultural phenomenon that could be sold to audiences far beyond the Laredos, “a binational phenomenon more as ideology than as fact, and it was in the distinction between the two that the relationship failed.”

Book Review: Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch: Life In Professional Baseball. 2001.

Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch:  Life In Professional Baseball. 1st ed. Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Print.

This is an extensively researched, sharply observed, well written anthropological account of the lifecycle of US professional baseball players in the 1990s.   It begins with descriptions of the dreams and aspirations of boys, before examining the few well-worn avenues teenagers and young men take to become salaried players.  Succeeding chapters explore the process of acculturation to exclusively male groups devoted entirely to the full-time pursuit of sport, the psychological demands of a game in which the ball is in play only 15 minutes for every three-hour match, the role of superstition, players’ relationships with wives and groupies, and the difficult adjustment to retirement.

Inside Pitch is based on interviews with 107 players, managers, coaches, and scouts conducted by former-minor-leaguer-turned-academic Dr George Gmelch, a professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco, author of a book-length account of behind-the-scenes baseball workers (In the Ballpark), and editor of a collection on global expressions of the game (Baseball without Borders).  Gmelch has most recently published an account of the US minor league experience of the 1960s based on journals written while a member in the Detroit Tigers farm system (Playing with Tigers).

Film & Book Review: White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium, 2008 & 2013

White Elephant: What is There to Save? (2008). [DVD] Miami, FL: Joe Cardona, producer, director; Rolando Llanes, director; Cantilever Productions, Kids in Exile Films.

Llanes, R. (2013). White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium. 1st ed. San Francisco: Blurb.


This is an odd film.  I came to it through an interest in baseball and my own childhood experience of attending Baltimore Orioles spring training games in the 60s and 70s.

But the film is not really about baseball, nor it seems much about the stadium itself.  It is more a collection of historical vignettes loosely connected to the stadium, which opened in 1949 and was demolished in 2001. The absence of an overarching narrative is confounded by nonlinear sequencing, intermittent poetry reading, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with the mid-20th century history of Miami, Cuba, and Central America.

Book Review: Cohen, M. No girls in the clubhouse: The exclusion of women from baseball. (2009)

Cohen, M. (2009). No girls in the clubhouse: The exclusion of women from baseball. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Author Marilyn Cohen, an Associate Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at St Peter’s University, New Jersey, has written an accessible account of the problems faced by American women seeking to play what has been perceived as a male sport.  While the content does not require specialized academic knowledge and the writing is clear and unaffected, a stronger editor might have eliminated what appear to be frequent redundancies.  Absent notes, indices, front matter, and illustrations, content amounts to less than 200 pages.

Though the chapters and discussions proceed chronologically, this is not an account seeking to document the role of women in American baseball.  That work, Marilyn Cohen observes, has been ably completed by a host of previous researchers, allowing her to focus more on theory and analysis.  Her methodology is that of most theorists - reading lots of books and articles.  Her principal sources are journalistic accounts and legal documents relating to cases of sex discrimination.  She says she also conducted interviews, through with whom is not clear.

Her analysis is “informed by social science perspectives, principally critical feminist theory, anthropology, and sociology.”   She sees sport as vital to the understanding of the process of the encoding of biological differences with symbolic meaning.  "No single social institution, with the exception of the military, has influenced the cultural construction of masculinity more strongly or has justified in biological terms more directly the inferiority of the female body resulting in the acceptance of gender-based discrimination.”  (I’d say religion has been far more damaging for a far longer time than modern sport, but that’s another book.)

Book Review: Yu, Junwei. Playing In Isolation: A History Of Baseball In Taiwan. 2007.

Yu, Junwei. Playing In Isolation:  A History Of Baseball In Taiwan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Playing In Isolation is an adapted version of a PhD thesis by a Taiwanese scholar, former amateur baseball player, and present professor at the National Taiwan University of Physical Education and Sport.  Much of the book deals with amateur baseball - a professional league debuting on the island only in the 1990s - and more specifically the role of government in sport.  As one of the first book-length texts on the subject in English, readers might expect a somewhat hagiographic account, but there is no cause for concern. Yu is unafraid to examine the negative effects of policy and in his introduction laments the unwanted government attention his research attracted.  For non-specialists, Yu does an adequate job providing the background necessary to follow his largely chronological account. The latter half of the book seems to offer a number of threads that aren’t woven into a larger story, a problem not uncommon for historians working on events contemporaneous to their own lives.  The writing is workmanlike, aimed at a general audience, and could have benefited from a stronger editor.

Book Review: Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. 2005.

Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

If you don’t know much of the sport as it developed in Japan, Remembering Japanese Baseball is probably not the best place to start learning.  It consists of transcribed interviews with 25 former players in Japan’s professional baseball league, ranging in time from the pre-war era to the late 1990s.  Of the 25 interviews, only five are with Japanese.  The title is a bit misleading, like a book called Remembering American Baseball containing interviews with players from Latin America and Asia.

Since publishing this collection in 2005, Fitts has gone on to write three books on Japanese baseball history:  a biography of the first American to play in Japan, the first Japanese to play in the US, and an account of Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan.  Remembering Japanese Baseball might be considered Fitts’ first notes for those projects, the groundwork that led him to and informed future research and writing.

Book review: Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice

Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

I finished this book just before leaving for a longish vacation filled with diversions a bit more appealing than writing a book review.  I didn’t want to let the reading pass, though, without saying a few words about an informative text that marks the end of a quarter century of baseball research in the Dominican Republic.  Klein’s first book, Sugarball (1991), was an ethnographic account of the sport on the Caribbean island in the mid to late 80s, including extensive discussion of the developing system of buscones and the MLB’s increasing interest in the country as a source of cheap and highly skilled labor.  In the interviewing years, Klein published several papers on Dominican baseball, as well as a book length project on baseball in a Mexican border town, in addition to research into the North American body-building subculture, and sport among Native American communities.

New pride, Old prejudice is something of an update rather than a full-blown ethnography, an analysis of the economic and political developments between the MLB and Dominican baseball.  While there are many irritants in the relationship, Klein concludes that the biggest problem appears to be the inability to agree on what constitutes a problem. The MLB, for example, sees the buscones as a nuisance, one to be reined in to create a more rational (and less expensive) labor supply.  Dominicans, on the other hand, are likely to see the buscones, in the absence of a strong government, as the actors most likely and most able to protect Dominican interests and procure appropriate levels of financial compensation for Dominican ball players.  It’s not clear how these issues will be resolved, but Klein feels that the fortunes of the Dominicans and the MLB are now tied so closely to each other that the two will sink or swim together.

For a lengthier look at this book, please see Dain TePoel’s review at Sport in American History:  https://ussporthistory.com/2014/10/06/review-of-alan-kleins-dominican-baseball-new-pride-old-prejudice/

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Book review: Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime

Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime. University of Nebraska Press.

The editor of this collection of 16 authors on baseball in 14 nations is a cultural anthropologist at Union College and University of San Francisco (as well as a former minor league player) and has written two books on baseball culture, Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball, and In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People. As only Japan and Cuba are represented by more than one essay, most writers take a broad historical perspective, so you can think of this collection as a global history of baseball. Writing is uneven but largely readable for a general audience.

For those wishing to skip the details, the concluding chapter provides a useful summary of findings. The Americans were not solely responsible for the global diffusion of the game, but were abetted by the Japanese, who took baseball with them to Taiwan and Korea, as well as by expatriate Cubans, who brought the game back from the US and then spread it across the Caribbean, most notably Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Spalding’s late 19th century world tour introduced the game to other corners of the world, and apart from Sri Lanka and Egypt, the game took root in all the other countries visited. (An investigation of these two outliers might provide interesting clues as to the intersection of the game and its audience, much as Kaufman and Patterson’s study of cricket in North America.) While baseball was part of the cultural baggage of invaders and colonizers, it was often used as a vehicle for the weaker party to assert its national and cultural identity. On the ball field, Koreans and Taiwanese could safely challenge the dominance of the Japanese, likewise the Cubans against the Spanish, and the Japanese against the Americans. Apart from the US, Japan, Cuba and the Dominican, baseball has been largely a marginal sport and has not approached the global appeal of basketball. The US game has in recent years become quicker and achieved greater defensive finesse as a result of the presence of increasing numbers of Latin players.

Given that most of the essays seem to follow the same outline and end up reviewing many of the details common to baseball most everywhere, redundancy could have been avoided if the same material had been presented by one author. Still, this was an enjoyable and informative read and a suitable introduction to baseball as it has developed across the world.

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Book Review: Fitts, R. (2008). Wally Yonamine: the man who changed Japanese baseball

Fitts, R. (2008). Wally Yonamine:  the man who changed Japanese baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Wally Yonamine was a Hawaiian of Japanese descent who played in Japan’s professional baseball league from 1951 to 1962.  For 27 years afterwards he served as a coach and general manager for several Japanese teams before becoming the only American so far inducted to Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.  He is sometimes compared to Jackie Robinson, the first player to break the racial-ethnic barrier in Japan’s post-war pro-league.   In fact a number of foreign players were part of the prewar game, but following Japan’s defeat and occupation few foreigners wanted to live or play in Japan, and the Japanese were not yet ready to live and work so closely with foreigners, most especially Americans.   Yonamine made this possible by meeting his hosts halfway - he looked Japanese and had a Japanese name.

When he arrived in Japan, food scarcity was still a reality, housing was often ramshackle, sewage was basic, and transport was slow and uncomfortable.  Perhaps the most interesting part of this biography are the chapters dealing with Yonamine’s move to Japan and the problems he and his family encountered in adjusting to life both on and off the field.  Also of interest, and perhaps worthy of book-length treatment or a film, is the Yomiuri Giants’ 1954-55 world tour of Australia, Philippines, and Latin America, a tremendous comedy of cultural errors.

Book review: Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card

Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

This is at once a beautiful and disappointing book.

The design and layout are superb and do much to highlight its subject, a collection of early to mid-20th century Japanese baseball cards.   Given the quick methods of production and cheap materials used during this period, the cards don’t present well in large format.  Most have been photographed in sets and appear in these pages in groups of anywhere from 4 to 30.  There isn’t much to learn here by looking, apart from acquiring a sense of the visual language used in marketing Japanese popular culture. For a few minutes you can enjoy the sight of Asian men in various poses of playing baseball, outfitted in old-style uniforms labelled with familiar names such as the Giants and Braves, surrounded by exotic text, sometimes rendered in penciled lines and most often presented in garish color.

About midway through there is a wonderful two page spread of a pair of children’s school bags from the 1940s, together with a set of cards found within.  Where did they come from?  Who found them?  Where are they now?  We are left without a clue, and this points to a serious deficiency in this text.  While it contains short essays on Japanese card production that are informative and not to be found in most other sources on Japanese baseball, there is little else here that can’t be found in Wikipedia or other common sources.  In the Further Reading section, the authors recommend the books of Robert Whiting, as well as a couple of other regularly cited sources, but nothing anyone interested in Japanese baseball hasn’t seen elsewhere, nothing that suggests the authors went to any great effort in researching material for this book.  While the cards presented here appear to have come from the personal collections of the authors, you’ll discover this only by looking in the Credits section at the back of the book.  There is no discussion of how or when these cards came into their possession.  There are no interviews with Japanese card collectors, dealers, card manufacturers, no background on the companies that made cards or the people involved in their production, no pictures of cards in situ.   Sayonara Home Run! is, in fact, a photographic collection of cards with a bit of text for the reader who knows nothing about Japanese baseball.

As a visual record, this is a lovely collection. Unfortunately, binding is poor.  The cover quickly separated itself from the text block under normal reading conditions.

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Book review: Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream.

Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

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.