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.

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.

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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