On two relatively
recent communities of international Major Leaguers, and the divergent strains
of immigration to which they connect.
To my mind, the
most interesting way to frame the mid-20th and early-21st
century histories of baseball (not from the sport’s earliest moments, that is,
but over the last fifty to seventy-five years) is through the lens of
diversification. Of course the most famous and striking moments on that
timeline relate to African American ballplayers: the rise of the Negro Leagues, the stories of Jackie
Robinson and Larry Doby,
the inspiring and uglier sides to Hank Aaron’s
record-setting career, and so on. But in the last few decades, paralleling
of course the nation’s expanding and evolving multi-cultural community,
baseball has grown far more diverse still: with the explosion
of Hispanic and Latin American ballplayers, for example, but also with the
increased presence of the two groups of international stars on whom I want to
focus in this post, Japanese and Cuban players.
These two groups
share a couple of core similarities: both have to this point featured mostly
players who were already successful professional ballplayers in their home
countries (a very different dynamic from young Latin American players drafted
in their teens, for example); and both became particularly prominent with the mid-1990s
arrivals of especially legendary such national stars, including the brothers Livan and Orlando “El
Duque” Hernández
from Cuba and Hideo
Nomo and Hideki Irabu from Japan. But due to the drastically distinct
situations in those home nations, such stars came to the United States and the
Major Leagues in very different ways: the Cuban players generally defecting
and escaping from the closed-off island nation, and thus often leaving family
and friends behind in the process; and the Japanese
players generally being publicly courted through high-priced bidding wars,
and thus often leaving their prior teams and leagues as conquering heroes. Of
course I can’t speak for any of these individuals, but it seems clear that the
move to the majors was thus far more fraught, diplomatically and personally,
for the Cuban than the Japanese stars.
Those Cuban
professional athletes are not, of course, directly equivalent in any way to other
potential refugees from that nation or similar situations—but they can
remind us that even in a high-profile world like major league baseball, the
very different cultural and historical paths to American identity and community
remain. Similarly, while the Japanese stars are not in the identical situation
as immigrants who come to the United States to (for example) study at elite
universities or perform
high-skilled occupations, they do connect to such experiences, and to the
complex narratives of national and immigrant need that both link and contrast
those immigration stories with the arrivals at the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder. Professional sports can feel like a fantasy world, and in many ways do
fit that description; but as with any part of our culture and society, they’re full
of exemplary histories and trends, and ripe for AmericanStudying.
Final diamond
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these histories, or other aspects of diversity in sports?
Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
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