Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream

by Alan M. Klein

“To the average Dominican, baseball is a major source of cultural pride…‘When you’re born, the hospital puts a pink ribbon in your crib if you’re a girl, and a baseball glove if you’re a boy.’”―from the Introduction. In the Dominican Republic baseball is not only a game but a national obsession. Exported from the United States and still controlled by it, the game is also a crucial arena of intercultural relations. Sugarball describes how Dominican baseball fosters national pride and competition with the United States while at the same time promoting acceptance of the North American presence in the country. Alan M. Klein traces the introduction and development of baseball in the Dominican Republic, provides lively sketches of fans, stadiums, and players, and discusses such issues as the origin of the Dominican baseball academies and the growing international competition for Dominican players. Throughout, he evokes the wild enthusiasm that Dominicans have for the game and shows how it mirrors the conflict they feel between allowing and resisting American hegemony in their country. Klein relates the efforts of major league teams to seek talent in the Dominican Republic and shape the game to suit their own purposes―efforts that resemble other exploitative enterprises in the third world. These activities evoke little resentment, because for many Dominican young men baseball is the only way out of a life of unemployment or of hard labor in cities or cane fields. At the same time, their prowess at baseball encourages the Dominicans to oppose further interference from the having produced more major league baseball players than any other country apart from the Untied States, they feel they can make certain claims for the game as their own.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Baseball

189 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 1991

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What Makes Sammy Hit Those Runs ?"

Growing up north of Boston in a small town, the Dominican Republic could not have been further from my consciousness. I knew it to be small, tropical and under the heel of a dictator who liked white suits and big cars. One day he had his date with a machine gun bullet and that was that. Subsequent political crises occasionally made the news, but not much more. But over the last 40 years, "La Republica Dominicana" gradually impinged on my consciousness. Nearby towns began to fill up with Dominican immigrants who cleaned houses, worked in restaurants and factories, and appeared at weekend yard sales. "Las Brisas del Caribe" takeout restaurants, "Quisqueya" travel agencies, many small store fronts offering "envios" and "llamadas" began to be seen. I had never gone to Santo Domingo, but it had at last come to us. And so, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire slugged out their famous home run duel of 1998, Dominican flags flew from countless cars, people painted Sosa's name on the rear windows of their Fords and Chevrolets and nobody could remain unaware that Dominican patriotism ran strong in suburban Massachusetts. Why did Dominicans get so passionately involved in baseball ? What did that contest mean to them ?
Alan Klein did not mention Sosa in his book, as it appeared in 1992. Although many major league players are mentioned by name, SUGARBALL is not an account of the exploits of Dominican ballplayers. Rather it is a sober, readable book, with an absolute minimum of jargon, of how cultural imperialism works in the area of sport. If the USA dominates the Dominican Republic economically, in the areas of sugar, tourism, and small-scale manufacturing, it also dominates culturally. Using often-mentioned ideas like `hegemony' and `resistance', Klein shows that though Americans introduced baseball into the country, it remained independent until the Dominicans got so talented that American major league teams sent permanent scouts to recruit talent. Eventually the US teams set up baseball academies to train rookies and siphon them up north to minor and major league teams. These academies operate like any other colonial outpost, according to Klein. They locate raw material (players), refine it, and ship it home. The drain of talent became so drastic that the local baseball leagues faced ruin, since all their players were being taken. Yet, in the baseball that remained, we can see a defiant strain---the very game that is the arena for exploitation can also provide a focus for nationalism. Hence the flags north of Boston in 1998. It is in describing this process that SUGARBALL is best. Readers may bog down in the history of Dominican baseball found in Chapter One, the details of which must be too arcane to be of much interest. The last chapter, with its overview of sports and cultural resistance, might have better been made the first, so that we would have perceived quickly the direction Klein wanted to take. This book fits well into any course on the sociology of sport or into a course on US relations with Latin America. It may also be read by people who want to understand the difference in cultural approach to the same game or set of institutions. The chapter on the atmosphere of the national baseball stadium is excellent for this. I was hoping for more connection to Dominican culture as a whole, especially with more Dominican voices. Dominicans are the subject of this work, but seldom get to speak. The research style and focus mark SUGARBALL as more a work of sociology than anthropology. I am not aware of other books with the same approach, even though sport is a multi-billion dollar industry found in every single nation on earth. Thus, if you are looking for a book that connects sport with economics and cultural domination of one nation by another, you have come to the right place.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

We’re used to the idea that Britain has a sporting empire, in large part because of the set of sports taken by the British to the colonies and embedded only there – cricket, netball, rugby to a lesser degree and the like. We’re less used to exploring and discussing the idea of an American sporting empire, although it doesn’t take long to realise that baseball for instance, the subject of this superb analysis by Alan Klein, is primarily played in the US sphere of influence.

Published in the early 1990s, so based on fieldwork in the 1980s, this remains a marker of good quality social science analysis of sport and of the value of ethnography as a methodology. Klein combines political economic analysis and ethnography to give us a clear insight to the organisation and demands of Dominican baseball both as it is played out in country and as it provides a pool of labour for US leagues. It is woven through with implicit and explicit critique of exploitation of Dominican baseball labour and of the dangers of a dream of making it big in the Major Leagues. (It is not just in baseball that Dominica is source of cheap goods for North America – it is a big supplier of garments as well.)

The political economy approach means that Klein has a clear sense of how power works to not only make Dominican baseball dependent, but how it skews and shapes the game to become a training ground for US leagues to skim off the best players, leading to big academies that promise much but deliver little to those who aspire to the Big League game. Klein clearly locates Dominican baseball in a long history of US involvement in Dominican politics and society, exploring the way this relationship has under-developed Dominican baseball, shaped it to US corporate interests but also provided a space for resistance and dissent to develop and play themselves out.

The book is methodologically rich, data heavy and sophisticated in its analysis and theorisation of a sport and a pastime. Despite its age these characteristics mean it remains one of the key texts in academic sport studies. Klein’s style and approach means that it should also have an audience well beyond the academic crowd. It is a wonderful analysis that reminds us of the significance of studying not just the everyday, but recognising the economic and industrial importance of cultural and leisure activities.