A Sense of Doubt blog post #3315 - Baseball is Proving the Power of Immigrants
Another Baseball post as I gear up for the start of the season. Expect more.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/21/baseball-immigrants-diversity/
Opinion
Baseball is
proving the power of immigrants. America should take the hint.
By Jaswinder
Bolina
February 21, 2024 at 5:45
a.m. EST
Jaswinder Bolina is a poet and essayist. His latest book is “English as a Second Language and Other Poems.”
As a former president of the United States excoriates immigrants for “poisoning the blood” of our country, as the governors of Texas and my current home state of Florida bus and fly migrants to points north — including my hometown, Chicago — my thoughts turn to baseball.
All through the game’s winter offseason, major league teams have been courting and signing free agents. I had hoped my beloved Cubs might woo one of those unsigned players to the North Side, one who happens to be among the most exorbitantly talented migrant workers in American history.
Sadly for me and other teams’ devotees in thriving sanctuary cities from Boston to San Francisco, Shohei Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers to play for that ballclub’s diverse and dedicated fans through the next three presidential elections.
I had hoped, too, that the Cubs might work out a trade for Juan Soto, another imported wunderkind. But he’ll be playing for legions of his fellow Dominicans, who make up one small portion of the New York Yankees’ cosmopolitan fan base.
The Cubs also didn’t land Jung Hoo Lee, Yariel Rodriguez or Yoshinobu Yamamoto. But I’m ecstatic they did sign Nippon Professional Baseball ace Shōta Imanaga to a multiyear contract that will see him pitching at Wrigley Field this summer and beyond.
Now, I eagerly await spring training games and Opening Day to distract me from another election cycle, one in which candidates — some of whose immigrant origins overlap with my own — have promised to deport entire families, arrest undocumented migrants and anyone who knows them, and close off and militarize our borders.
While that inhospitable bunch has been villainizing migrants and refugees as a strain on U.S. resources, I have been marveling at how much foreign-born players have enlivened (and enriched) baseball in recent decades. Far from being poisoned, the sport has been rejuvenated by infusions of immigrants from Ohtani to Soto to Ronald Acuña Jr., Yordan Álvarez, Ha-Seong Kim, the Cubs’ Seiya Suzuki and so many others.
As these non-White non-Americans wow — and earn — millions with their transcendent talents, in a sport still emerging from its startlingly racist past, bigoted fictions about the “blood of our country” are being exposed. It’s true that baseball is still struggling with exploitative international recruiting practices, decreasing numbers of U.S.-born Black players and a lack of diversity among its executive ranks. Yet the increasing number of foreign-born major leaguers now counted among the best in the game’s long history dispels the self-aggrandizing myth that the United States possesses any monopoly on excellence.
The Republican presidential front-runner might argue that undocumented migrants and refugees aren’t elite athletes and are instead “animals” arriving from “s---hole countries.” But such dehumanizing insults are not only guilty of offensive fixation on national origin, ethnicity and race. They also mistake a person’s predicament for a person’s potential.
This is made plain by the origin stories of some of baseball’s biggest stars. Those same players who fashioned makeshift mitts out of milk cartons and cardboard, who rose to the game’s highest levels through arduous, harrowing and near-tragic journeys, might have languished on the other side of a barbed and militarized wall if this country’s right wing had its way.
The politicians who would build those walls, who attack immigrants for supposedly burdening our national resources, need only consider baseball’s explosive growth into a $10 billion industry and the financial value of Ohtani alone to the Dodgers — some estimate the team could make more than $1 billion off his deal over the course of a decade — to see that industries and economies thrive by inclusion, not exclusion.
A global fan base is a growing fan base. This is a lesson that Major League Baseball — which has scheduled games in the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Mexico and England this year — has learned. It is something the National Basketball Association and the National Football League have learned. Which is why all these leagues are aggressively expanding their efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion: Commissioners and team owners know that those three words, too often demonized and weaponized, offer one of the greatest economic opportunities in U.S. history.
Even so, ideologues seek to end inclusive practices in private industry and public education. They guarantee endless winning and new revolutions by promising to slash resources and wall off our country — all while whiffing on the most rudimentary of winning principles understood by most every baseball fan in America:
Great teams are made great by deep, diversified rosters. They are built on investment in both homegrown and international talent. And there are no curses except those that are self-inflicted by cheap, regressive thinking.
As the Republican presidential primary churns toward that party’s national convention, coinciding this July with baseball’s annual All-Star Game, all of this will be evident to anyone ready to take a break from the campaign, take a seat in the bleachers and take in the world’s greatest ballplayers thriving at America’s game.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2403.16 - 10:10
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