EPILOGUE

Estadio Quisqueya, the Dominican Republic’s most hallowed ballpark, was nearly deserted and eerily subdued. Just three nights before, on January 12, it had held the biggest crowd in years as primordial foes Licey and Escogido battled for the last spot in the 2010 winter league championship. But earlier that same evening, the ground shook as tectonic plates slipped along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, one of two upon which the entire island of Hispaniola uneasily floats. Port-au-Prince, on the Haitian side of the island, was devastated.

Haiti casts long shadows over the Dominican Republic in the aftermath of the earthquake. The tremors of the Port-au-Prince catcaclysm were also felt in Santo Domingo, where buildings trembled and swayed. But they remained standing, unlike those in the Haitian capital, which collapsed into rubble, suffocating tens of thousands. Hall of Famer Juan Marichal was chatting with his sister and friends on his farm in Los Alcarrizos outside Santo Domingo when the earthquake hit. At first, he thought somebody was kicking his chair; when he stood up, he felt dizzy. “This could have happened to us,” he said softly.1 Nobody will ever be certain as to the death toll, but estimates range as high as 250,000 fatalities.

Despite their twisted and tortured history with Haiti, Dominicans have responded forcefully to the disaster. The refrain Haití, pobre Haití echoed frequently on television, in the press, and on the street in the days after the earthquake. For the time being, the earthquake’s horrors have conquered Dominican fears of being overwhelmed—again—by Haitians. Hand-wringing over the long-term consequences of refugees pouring into the Dominican Republic, adding to the estimated 1 million Haitians already living there, will return in time. But for the moment, the better parts of the Dominican national character are ascendant.

Unable to contact Haitian president René Préval after the earthquake, Dominican president Leonel Fernández commandeered a helicopter to fly to Port-au-Prince. Finding President Préval at a police station near the airport, Fernández pledged his nation’s support and quickly dispatched rescue workers and medical personnel to Port-au-Prince. All official Dominican festivities were canceled and flags flown at half-mast. Government institutions, the private sector, and neighborhood groups mobilized overnight to save lives and aid survivors. Most Dominicans accepted that their country represented Haiti’s lifeline, the only way in during a critical window for relief workers and supplies. Reconstructing Haiti in the long run will require building even stronger relations with the Dominican Republic.2 Salvation for most Haitians on their side of Hispaniola is hard to conjure; it’s too far gone, too ecologically and socially devastated by centuries of abuse by foreign and national elites.

Many years ago, Winston Llenas, then managing the Aguilas ball club, said to me, “Can you imagine what kind of hellhole Haiti must be that Haitians think the Dominican Republic is paradise?” In stark contrast to the now-decimated Port-au-Prince, the Dominican capital city of Santo Domingo has been transformed in the last decade, reflecting the great sophistication, wealth, and creativity that is flourishing there. Flocks of construction cranes crowd one another overhead. But urban squalor and rural privation have not gone away. The Dominican underclass is neither as large nor as desperate as in Haiti, where more than two-thirds of the country’s 9 million people subsist on less than $2 a day. But still it numbers in the millions and its prospects are anything but bright.

The Dominican Republic has diverged more and more from Haiti since I first visited the country in 1980. Investments in education, transportation, infrastructure, tourism, and a more transparent democratic culture have paid compounding dividends. So has baseball. Haitians, on the other hand, hardly noticed baseball until U.S. sporting goods factories arrived in the 1970s. At their peak, Port-au-Prince’s ten factories produced 20 million baseballs a year, stitched by hand by women making less than a quarter an hour for their labor. But baseball as a game did not catch on, much less displace soccer. In the late 1980s the sporting goods companies decamped for Costa Rica, citing chronic political instability. Baseball has scarcely been seen since. While Haitians growing up in the Dominican Republic play the game, many of them encounter difficulty in making it a career because they so often lack birth documents establishing age and citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Haitian diaspora in the United States, especially in Florida, has gravitated to football. A score of Haitian Americans play in the National Football League, hardly any in Major League Baseball.3 In the aftermath of the earthquake, several of them spoke forcefully about the need to help the beleaguered country they had left behind. Indianapolis Colts receiver Pierre Garcon wrapped the American Football Conference championship trophy with a Haitian flag following his team’s victory over the New York Jets on January 24, 2010, less than two weeks after the earthquake. “I felt like I had to represent Haiti,” Garcon said. “There are people out there trapped and dying as we speak, children with legs being amputated. I had to play for them.” Garcon not only set an AFC record in the championship game with eleven receptions, he raised several hundred thousand dollars for relief work on the island.4

But while baseball hardly matters in Haiti, it has emerged as a major wellspring of lifeblood for the Dominican economy, more so than in any other Caribbean nation. It has pumped billions of dollars into the Dominican Republic, strengthened its sense of national identity, and burnished its image abroad. In addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries paid to Dominican ballplayers, Major League Baseball estimates that its academies annually inject $84 million into the economy and generate over two thousand nonplaying jobs. Several thousand other men and women work for buscones or the winter league.

Baseball’s impact can be seen on an intimate level in Consuelo, where on a Sunday morning, boys clad in mismatched uniforms sit at attention in a dugout and listen wide-eyed as their manager tells them that Consuelo and neighboring San Pedro de Macorís are the true source of baseball in the republic. He stresses that Consuelo, home to about thirty thousand people, not Santo Domingo, whose population numbers over 2 million, is why Dominican baseball is the best in the world. He names local ballplayers—Julio Franco, Alfredo Griffin, Sammy Sosa, and former All-Star infielder Juan Samuel—and tells the boys that they can follow in the footsteps of such legends. The chances of that are slim, but still it’s a better chance than the one they have of following their fathers into the nearby sugar mill. Consuelo’s ingenio was shuttered several years ago and is unlikely to reopen, costing thousands their livelihood and much of their future.

In the vacuum created by the mill’s closure, locals have turned to what remains: baseball. It’s about all the town has left, and juvenile leagues fill Consuelo’s ball fields, which exist in varying states of disrepair. Scores of Consuelo boys spend their weekdays at the academies. In addition, about ten buscones operate programs in Consuelo, recruiting prospects from the juvenile leagues. If sugar once defined Consuelo, now baseball is at the core of its evolving identity and battered economy.

Most Dominicans appreciate baseball for sport’s sake or as a profession, but more and more are coming to see the game as a force for national development. Baseball figures in Dominican-sponsored tourist campaigns targeting North Americans as well as in efforts to create jobs and promote growth. President Fernández returned from a European junket in December 2009 with tentative Portuguese and Spanish commitments to build the Juan Ma-richal Sports Complex, the country’s biggest baseball project yet. Whether financing ultimately materializes likely will depend on Europe’s own troubled economy. The project’s centerpiece is a major refurbishing of Estadio Quisqueya, which will allow the Dominican Republic to be considered as a host country for the World Baseball Classic in 2013. Plans call for several high-rise apartment buildings, a four-star hotel, and a baseball museum to surround the ballpark and rejuvenate adjacent neighborhoods.5

Marichal met Fernández in New York City after the president’s trip to Europe. The two men rendezvoused at the Public Theater to watch Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man play Juan and John, which revolves around the notorious 1965 incident during a heated Giants-Dodgers game, when Ma-richal attacked John Roseboro. The two men later crafted a friendship far more enduring than their altercation, prompting Smith, who was a boy in Los Angeles that summer of ’65, to write the play. When Fernández was a boy living in Manhattan at the same time that Smith was growing up in Los Angeles, his nickname was Marichal. After winning election to the presidency in 1996, he asked the real Marichal to serve as his minister of sport.

Marichal retains a country boy’s down-to-earth demeanor despite being feted as a national icon since the 1960s. He was humbled when the president asked to name the complex for him. “What could I say but thank you,” he explained. “I am so honored.”6 While a project of this magnitude is small when compared with the costs of developing a ballpark in the United States, where pricetags have routinely run upwards of a billion dollars, it is a significant undertaking for the Dominican Republic.

The Marichal complex reflects a push by Dominicans to gain greater influence over baseball on the island. In the last decade, they have clashed with U.S. interests over the game’s ownership, just as Venezuelans and Mexicans have contested for control of baseball in their countries. While the buscones tangle with U.S. sports agents over who will represent players, and the Dominican government negotiates the terms of Major League Baseball’s engagement in the country, some Dominicans are focusing on reclaiming the island’s baseball infrastructure. Among them, Junior Noboa has led the way.

Thirty years ago, Noboa joined the Cleveland Indians organization as a seventeen-year-old. Despite hitting only one home run during his eight major league seasons, Noboa has since had as much impact on Dominican baseball as any league-leading slugger. “When I signed with Cleveland in 1981, there was nothing here,” Noboa said. “Major league facilities at that time were really bad.”7 Noboa reasoned that if his country could develop so many players with a mediocre infrastructure, a better system would produce even more. After observing what the Dodgers had achieved at Campo Las Palmas, Noboa resolved to build his own academy.

These days, many in baseball regard Noboa as a visionary. In the mid-1990s he had a hard time finding people to take him seriously, much less bankroll his dream. But after securing a partner willing to invest in his venture, Noboa became the first Dominican to construct an academy and rent it to a major league club. The Arizona Diamondbacks began using the facility he built in Boca Chica in 1997.8

A few other Dominican ex–big leaguers—José Rijo, Salomon Torres, and Balvino Galvez—subsequently built their own academies, but Noboa didn’t stop with the Diamondbacks complex. Since then, Noboa has built facilities that he rents to the Rockies, Cubs, Twins, Reds, Orioles, Indians, White Sox, and Phillies. The New York Yankees employed him to design and build their complex. So did the Academy, the private, for-profit complex run by ex–New York Yankees vice president Steve Swindal and former U.S. ambassador Hans Hertell. A third of the thirty major league organizations operate their academies at complexes Noboa built, and several more compounds are in the planning stages.

Because of Noboa, a majority of Dominican academies are now tightly clustered outside Boca Chica, a small coastal town near the airport close to both Santo Domingo and San Pedro de Macorís. Their location allows visiting major league scouting directors, coaches, and executives to fly in, evaluate their prospects, stay near the airport or in Santo Domingo, and leave without absorbing much culture shock. The academies’ proximity to each other also cuts down on travel time for Dominican Summer League games.

Noboa, who also directs Latin American operations for the Diamondbacks and is the assistant general manager for Escogido in the winter league, leads a company of one hundred employees who maintain and manage the complexes for their major league tenants. He mentors his employees, like Luis Felipe Urueta. After signing when he was seventeen, the Colombian-born Urueta played for a decade in the minor leagues and in Italy. Noboa hired him when he retired, and Urueta has since managed in the Dominican Summer League and worked as the Diamondbacks’ Boca Chica field coordinator. Like Noboa, Urueta acquired the bilingual, cosmopolitan facility to tutor the young men who live at the academy and help them succeed beyond the ball field. At the same time, he works with Diamondback executives who are counting on the academy to stock their minor league system and contribute to the major league roster. He personifies what writer Tim Wendel calls the “new face of baseball.”9

Urueta nods dismissively at the buscones who hover near the backstop during a January 2010 tryout. He distrusts most of them, yet acknowledges that the number of prospects who have taken performance-enhancing drugs or lied about their age has been declining. Still, the perception that steroid use and age falsification are endemic has been difficult to overcome. The long-term hope is that the much-battered Dominican brand rebounds.

Major league teams now scrutinize the boys they sign much more carefully, investigating their age and identity and administering physicals to test for drug use. Signing bonuses are not disbursed until a boy has passed these examinations, and the buscones who hope to stay in business for long are cleaning up their acts. The reform message is mixed. Dominican third baseman Duanel Jones, for example, signed with the San Francisco Giants in December 2009 and was due a $1.3 million bonus until he failed the club’s drug test. The seventeen-year-old’s contract was voided and his career was over. But not for long; a few months later, the San Diego Padres and Jones agreed to terms that included a $900,000 bonus. After serving a fifty-game suspension, Jones will receive almost $1 million.10

Taking ownership of baseball on the island will require Dominicans to lead the effort to stop abuses in player procurement and development. They can ill afford to wait for Major League Baseball, whose dilatory style of confronting problems allowed age and drug quandaries to fester. But MLB has recently become more proactive, forcing Dominicans to react to their increasingly aggressive posturing. Upset over the growing number of incidents, which cost teams money and embarrassed them greatly, especially when team employees were proven to be complicit in skimming bonuses, MLB commissioner Bud Selig tasked longtime baseball executive Sandy Alderson with revamping its operations in the Dominican Republic.

After Alderson completed a preliminary investigation, MLB floated plans in February 2010 to organize its own youth leagues in the Dominican Republic as an alternative to buscone operations. A boy’s participation would be contingent on submitting to fingerprinting.11 Major League Baseball would then have a database to verify the identities and ages of boys its teams might sign. In May 2010 Alderson said that prospects as young as fifteen would be fingerprinted and tested for performance-enhancing drugs before they would be permitted to sign with teams. “Fingerprinting technology will help us [resolve age questions] and lock in their identities,” he said. Alderson, who had studied Dominican operations before advocating the new policies, said that the problems were greater than he had realized. “It will require time and hands-on commitment to effect these changes.”

Before MLB issued its new policies, Alderson met with a group of Dominican baseball men at the Ministry of Sports in an effort to allay their anxieties. “Everyone’s really afraid of him,” Edgar Mercedes said afterward. Mercedes, one of the more successful buscones, argues that most Dominicans welcomed stiffer drug testing and greater legal enforcement to stop criminal activity that exploits boys and dupes teams. But, he added, “everyone’s in a panic mode. People are just saying he’s using us to bring in the draft.”

Redolent of the British Empire fingerprinting its Indian subjects in the nineteenth century, the identity program will likely affront Dominican sensibilities and could hit stiff resistance as it is implemented. But the draft is a greater worry. When Alderson met with major league scouts at the Embajador Hotel, where parts of The Godfather were filmed, hundreds of buscones and their young charges protested outside, shouting, “No to the draft!” They understand that a draft would eliminate their leverage to shop their clients to multiple teams in order to extract larger signing bonuses. Alderson acknowledges that expanding the player draft might be his trump card. “If we don’t clean up the abuses, I think there’s a very strong likelihood there will be a draft,” he warned. “But that’s not why we’re here. I am not a precursor to the draft.”12

“A draft would kill baseball here,” Junior Noboa countered. “Fewer kids would be signed and it would hurt the country.”13 He argued that the buscones have become central to player development, and that maintaining good relationships with them is critical to gaining access to the best talent.

Expanding the draft abroad would require MLB to reach agreement with the MLB Players Association—never an easy matter—but many expect it to be a part of negotiations for the next contract, that will begin in December 2011. Whether the Dominican government would cooperate is also unclear, and extending the draft to Venezuela, Mexico, or Nicaragua seems even more problematic. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, both ardent fanaticos, surely will defend their national prerogatives, while Mexico has tightly controlled the destiny of its players ever since the Mexican baseball war ended. Mexicans are unlikely to surrender that hard-won advantage.14

Dominicans are not in denial about age and drug problems. Juan Ma-richal, for one, readily acknowledges that deceit plagues the system. But he is wary of MLB efforts to cut Dominicans out of baseball operations and exert more direct control of young island prospects. “Major League Baseball,” Marichal declares, “should do better for baseball in Latin America. They make so much money here; they should do more and hire good people in each country to advance the good name of baseball.” But Marichal is not counting on Major League Baseball to resolve the problems afflicting the Caribbean game. Dominicans, he believes, need to act first. Still, for the time being, MLB has seized the initiative.

Marichal cares the most about the young, often extremely vulnerable, boys seeking to launch careers. He was one of them once and reminisces about Buddy Kerr, his minor league manager for the Michigan City White Caps, who accompanied him and other Latinos and African Americans on a four-day bus ride through the Jim Crow South in 1958. Kerr went with them to the back doors of restaurants to make sure they were fed. “I never forget Buddy Kerr,” Marichal says. “He was like our father.” Baseball must put the boys first, he argues, like Buddy Kerr did. “If you treat a kid nice, he gives one hundred percent for you on the field and off of it, too. If not . . .”

Marichal understands that he, Felipe Alou, Manuel Mota, and their peers have roles to play in restoring Dominican baseball’s integrity. He mentions a younger generation of men—former major leaguers who manage and operate Dominican teams, including Winston Llenas, Junior Noboa, Stanley Javier, and Felix Fermin—who can shape its future. “These are people not just trying to make money but trying to help,” he emphasizes.15

Marichal believes that the Dominican Republic will produce ever-greater numbers of quality players. He’s probably right. The academies are home to over a thousand players enjoying improved nutrition, training, and coaching. Teams are also engaging more seriously in academic efforts. For some, the effort is superficial. But elsewhere, clubs have worked with foundations and nonprofit groups to educate their Dominican players. At the Pittsburgh Pirates’ new complex in La Gina, most of the boys in residence enter the academy with an education level anywhere between second and tenth grade. Working with a government-affiliated educational program, the organization seeks to help each attain an eighth- or twelfth-grade diploma before leaving. To that end, the boys attend classes four hours a day, four days a week.

Such efforts make sense from Major League Baseball’s perspective. Better-educated boys who can communicate in English will adapt more readily to professional baseball in the United States. But as Trevor Gooby, who directs Pittsburgh’s academy, points out, few of them will become major leaguers. The organization, he says, bears a responsibility to help those who will not make the majors better themselves, too.16

Educational efforts and regulating the buscones, Marichal contends, are crucial. But so is coming to terms with the past. “You don’t know how hard I took it when Alex [Rodriguez] and Sammy [Sosa] admitted what they had done.” He had believed their denials of steroid use. “When I found out I was wrong about them, it was very hard for me.”17 Everyone, he argues, should speak honestly and completely about what they have done. Major League Baseball, however, has dallied too long to easily overcome the damage it has inflicted upon itself and the game by its head-in-the-sand approach to performance-enhancing drugs. A commission to get at the truth, à la South Africa after apartheid or in Argentina after the end of its military dictatorship, would have helped make amends. But it’s probably too late for that now.

On April 15 each season, every player in the majors wears a uniform with the number 42 to honor Jackie Robinson. In 2010 Gary Matthews Jr. found himself the lone African American on the Mets on Jackie Robinson Day. His teammates included six white Americans, one Hispanic American, three Puerto Ricans, one Cuban, two Japanese, two Mexicans, four Venezuelans, and five Dominicans. “It makes me sad,” Matthews said as he reflected on his own experience growing up at the ballpark, the son of major leaguer Gary Matthews, at a time when black players were commonplace. Ironically, the just-released annual study conducted by Central Florida University’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport awarded MLB an A for racial diversity based on the previous season. The Mets’ last two managers were African American, and Matthews said that he doubted that his organization intentionally sought to discourage black players from making the roster. But neither have the Mets been especially proactive in cultivating black players and fans. The atrophy of their connection to the black community stands in marked contrast to their efforts to grow their Latin fan base. After Dominican-born Omar Minaya became their general manager in 2005, he revamped the Mets roster by signing high-profile Latinos like Pedro Martínez and Carlos Beltran. At the same time, the club intensified marketing in the metropolitan region’s Hispanic American neighborhoods. As a result, the Mets now estimate that more than 20 percent of their fans are Hispanic.18

The Mets are not alone in fielding few black players. African Americans comprised only 9 percent of all major leaguers in 2009. “All cultures bring something different to the game of baseball,” Matthews offered. “The African American player, there is a charisma that he brings from his culture. That ingredient adds a little spice to the game. That little spice is missing when we’re not participating.”19 Black zest is not about to return anytime soon. Nor is Matthews, who was released by the Mets two months after the event honoring Jackie Robinson.20 Boosting African American participation in major league baseball would require high-energy efforts of a sort never seen before. The best MLB has going for it in this regard is RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities).

John Young’s major league career lasted only two games, but his impact on the game in recent years has been profound. Since Young, who became a scout after he stopped playing, persuaded gang chieftains in Los Angeles to let him organize RBI in 1989, well over two hundred RBI programs have taken shape in the U.S. and abroad, with about two hundred thousand boys and girls participating. While Young built his first program in a black neighborhood, RBI welcomes youth of all racial backgrounds. More than one hundred RBI participants have been drafted by major league teams; forty or so of them were playing major league or minor league baseball in 2007, including Jimmy Rollins, Dontrelle Willis, C. C. Sabathia, Carl Crawford, B. J. and Justin Upton, and Coco Crisp.

But RBI’s goal is more to rebuild the community than refurbish baseball’s grass roots. Richard Berlin directs the Harlem RBI program, a community-based organization that seeks to repair the social fabric of black communities by capitalizing on a sense of nostalgia for when that community was healthier and baseball was part of the reason why. Berlin sees baseball’s decline as a reflection of many aspects of life that have withered in black communities. In its Harlem neighborhood, an area five blocks wide by twenty-five blocks long, RBI targets education and social development more than it does the acquisition of baseball skills. But these efforts might be much too little and much too late.21

Back in the Caribbean, community life and parts of the economy still revolve around baseball. Increasingly proactive Dominican efforts to gain control of baseball’s agenda there illustrate why the fates of African Americans and Latinos, once linked inextricably by the major leagues’ color line, subsequently diverged. After integration, baseball’s center of gravity moved from black communities and the Caribbean to the major leagues. But by dint of geography and sovereignty, the Caribbean was better able to resist Major League Baseball’s takeover than black America. The region was too far away for the major leagues to consider building stadiums or operating leagues there. Nor were major league clubs easily able to comprehend and deal with its tricky political landscape, hinging as it so often did on complex layers of foreign laws and the machinations of imperious leaders. As a result, Latinos always owned their venues and teams. Their leagues, unlike the Negro Leagues, did not collapse after integration. Nor did the all-important wellspring of amateur and semipro baseball in the region dry up as it did in black neighborhoods in the 1950s and ’60s. On the contrary, Latin baseball prospered in integration’s wake. Latin control of teams, leagues, ballparks, and academies might even expand in coming years. That sort of ownership in black America, absent for more than half a century, is unlikely ever to return.

Mercifully, since Jackie Robinson shattered the color line in 1947, baseball has neither witnessed a push to resegregate nor a xenophobic backlash against foreign players. Perhaps that’s because as players of color spread to all corners of the majors, fans throughout baseball America began having black and Latin stars of their own to cheer on to their club’s greater glory. But surely it’s also due to the deeply held belief that baseball, at its foundation, is a democratic game, a meritocracy open to all. Racist and nativistic comments are often heard at ballparks. At the same time, Jackie Robinson remains baseball’s greatest hero and Roberto Clemente, for many, is close behind. Even amid the current crescendo of intense anti-immigrant attacks in the broader U.S. culture, no voices have called to ban or limit Latinos in major league baseball. Nor is that likely to happen.

For their part, any number of African American and Latino ballplayers have engaged in good works, backed candidates, and supported socially progressive causes in recent years. Some, like Los Angeles Angels outfielder Torii Hunter and Mets general manager Omar Minaya, have done so thoughtfully and with great respect for the past. But ballplayers today rarely take stands that resonate beyond the ballpark. Baseball has no angry men today, no Robinson or Clemente to roar against, for example, the noxious anti-immigrant laws that Arizona passed in April of 2010.

Anger, of course, is harder to summon, much less express, when the average major league salary now tops $3 million. Black and Latino ballplayers no longer burn with the blatant indignities of segregated lodgings on the road and racial disparities in pay. They are among the best-paid players in the game, in fact, accounting for fifteen of the twenty highest salaries in 2010.22 As a result, most ballplayers are well insulated from social injustice. That these men encounter so few issues in baseball demanding their attention explains some of their political quietude. If anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States, or MLB efforts to control baseball in the Caribbean, become even more contentious, Latin players might join the resistance to these trends. But for African Americans, sport simply does not matter as much socially and politically as it did when baseball was a high-stakes arena for symbolic struggle. One broken link—a relatively new phenomenon in baseball’s long history—is that, today, black athletes can find themselves largely cut off from black neighborhoods after they achieve success. In stark contrast, Dominican ballplayers can always go home to the open arms of communities banded together across income levels by the great equalizer of baseball.

The hard truth is that black Americans no longer look to their ballplayers as reverently as Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans regard their diamond heroes. In Venezuela, the 2005 death of Alfonso “Chico” Carrasquel, a shortstop who became the first Hispanic to appear in an All-Star Game, was remembered with two days of national mourning; Johán Santana’s Cy Young Award affirmed the entire country. Dominicans see their ballplayers as treasures, their cherished ambassadors to the world. They still play and watch with infectious joy. It’s not the same in black America. Black Americans resurrected baseball’s spirit and remade the very way the game was played, but their turn center-stage is over. It’s Latino time now.

For the moment, the Great Recession that began in 2008 has put the brakes on the radical corporate makeover of the baseball universe. A deep and prolonged slump in the business of sport might actually free Caribbean baseball to remain truer to its sandlot roots. At the least it’s given the Caribbean a small reprieve from baseball’s yanqui colonizers. Perhaps the Caribbean will avoid the fate endured by baseball in the black community, which lost control of its own sporting life. For over a century, Caribbean players have found renewal in a baseball world of their own, with its own constellation of leagues, teams and trainers, coaches, sports writers and broadcasters, vendors, and—most importantly—fans. It’s a rich but fragile world, one where the very kinds of communities that first embraced baseball can still prevail. And if it’s lost, the last, best piece of baseball’s soul may well go with it.