[As I’ve
done each of the
last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on
AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up
to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]
On two relatively
recent communities of international Major Leaguers, and the divergent strains
of immigration to which they connect.
As this week’s
earlier posts have no doubt reflected, to my mind the most interesting way to
frame the 20th and early-21st century histories of
baseball (not from the sport’s earliest 19th century moments, that
is, but over at least the last hundred years) is through the lens of
diversification. Although Monday’s subject, Hank Greenberg, helps us consider
that trend’s longstanding presence, many of the most famous and striking
moments on the diversification 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, Cuban and Japanese 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 and brought to the US minor leagues, 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 at the time, such stars came to the United
States and the Major Leagues in very different ways: the Cuban players generally defecting
and escaping from the then 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 from their home country to the majors was 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—not least because
their prior prominence and unquestioned talents all but guarantee them
employment upon their successful arrival in the US—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 can be connected to such experiences, and to
the complex narratives of national and immigrant need that both link and
contrast those immigration stories with arrivals who find themselves instead at
the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Professional sports can feel like a
fantasy world, and in many ways they do fit that description; but as with any
part of our culture and society, they’re full of exemplary lives and
identities, histories and trends, and ripe for AmericanStudying.
Last baseball
life tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?
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