Isn't there a certain arrogance in the implicit boast that the World Series is the world's conclusion about the championship? Where do we get off imagining that our leagues decide such a thing? But in a surprising way it is true, ironically, now fifty years after the big leagues allowed Jackie Robinson to play; "ironically" because opening the door to Robinson--a native American--not only admitted blacks, but people of color generally, meaning lots and lots of people who were not Americans at all, or more accurately, who were "Americans" but not from the United States. The game is more international than it has ever been largely because we gave full baseball citizenship to our own.

This past season there were approximately 150 Latin American major league baseball players.ⁱ Of this group 25 were U.S.-born latinos. The other 125 players had come from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. A relative handful were recruited in Nicaragua and Panama. Sixty of the Hispanics playing major league baseball have come from the Dominican Republic. The most startling statistic of all: these 150 Hispanic players make up 20% of the big leagues.

Because I am a fan of baseball I could not help but get swept up in the playoffs and series, but for some time I have been thinking about the game differently than in years past. After a lifetime of misery following the hapless Red Sox, this was probably a fortunate development.

At some level this change of perspective must have stemmed from the experience of watching the Philles in 1993. That team may have fallen short in the final analysis but in the grand scheme it wasn't important. There were too many inspiring stories among that motley cast to complain about a small matter like having won the series.

That was also the same year that Andrés Galarraga made a bid to surpass a .400% hitting average. Carmen took no small pride in the fact that he is a Venezuelan. In truth she didn't have much interest in the game. For her it was some incomprehensible American thing. But when she seized on Galarraga's achievement we negotiated some common ground, which, in retrospect, was a personal version (for both of us) of that larger cultural transformation C.L.R. James described in connection with cricket.

Cricket? Yes. There are several reasons why I have come to see baseball differently; James was one of them. Somewhere along the line I read a review of a book about cricket written by a black Marxist from Trinidad named C.L.R. James. It was the first I had heard of him. The reviewer described James proposing that, by means of cricket, a British empire was both extended and subverted. He was completely serious and possessed of enough qualifications in his other intellectual endeavors to have to be taken seriously. The idea certainly made an impression on me. Cricket? Here in the Americas? As a tool of colonialism? I could vaguely grasp the outlines of the thesis but the actual application to the West Indies eluded me. I just didn't know enough about the region to be able to make heads or tails of the argument. Nor for that matter did I know anything about cricket. But, in this sense I suppose I was in the same position as most West Indians were when first watching the British cricketers. Or Carmen trying to make sense of baseball.

Try explaining the rules of baseball to someone unfamiliar with them. Believe me they are as arcane and unfathomable as those of cricket seem to be. Baseball is usually portrayed by Hollywood as an elemental game, but the rules suggest a bureaucratization of Kafkaesque proportions. Likewise with the statistical records that are compiled. The inscrutibility of stock market quotations looks positively transparent compared to the abbreviations in a box score. Would such minute and scrupulous records of player "production" ever arise in a socialist country? Surely here are some valuable "indicators" of cultural norms.

From what I can discern James' willingness to get his hands dirty with a cricket bat accounts for a resurgence of interest in at least one line of his work. Over the course of a long life (1901-1989) he published almost continuously. In the eight years since his death a spate of books offering either excerpts or interpretation has mushroomed. And the focus on his cultural studies, his explorations of what has come to be known as "popular culture," has been strong.

James is one reason I've been reluctant to imaginatively set foot on Trinidad. Naipaul is the other. These two men were/are so prolific that to contemplate trying to say something coherent about them is discouraging. Even a fraction of their work is still a mountain of written material and each slice is bound up in larger frames of theory, history and an individual life. (For the same reason I've skipped over the Cuban José Marti, even though what I've read of his reporting from the United States in the late 1800's is fascinating stuff.) Naipaul proved to be a little easier to digest in smaller fragments but James...

First off he was all over the map. It wasn't just that he travelled, but he set up camp and burrowed in: beginning in Trinidad, followed by an early period in England, well over a decade in the United States, again an interim in Great Britain, then back to Trinidad, and ending in London. His work would constantly reach for overarching organizations and movements which he found in the world-wide spread of Communism, the African diaspora, global British imperialism, or a united, independent Caribbean. In each pursuit he involved himself personally. He met with Leon Trotsky in Mexico, advised Kwame Nkruma in Ghana, worked under Eric Williams' post-colonial government in Trinidad and so on. The breadth of forms in which he wrote was similarly expansive: there are scholarly studies, biographies, letters, political diatribes, plays, novels, autobiography, short stories, essays, translations, even reams of newspaper journalism on cricket matches. He was steeped in the Greek classics, had a command of English literature, and immersed himself in Marx, Engles, Lenin and Trotsky. He wrote a quirky critical study of Moby Dick arguing that the Pequod was a symbolic factory in which the downtrodden workers suffered under the boot (peg) of the capitalist entrepreneur, Ahab. James' was a daunting life and mind contemporaneous with Eric Walrond, Claude McKay, Naipaul, Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid. That's a hell of a life span to be marked by an ongoing intellectual engagement.

Today I am aware of two living Caribbean intellectuals who have achieved international recognition. Unfortunately Edward Glissant's books have not been translated into English so I've had no opportunity to read him. Stuart Hall's situation is a little different. He is one of those who have chosen to extract the cultural strain in James. A Jamaican, Hall has lived and taught in England for quite awhile. Although his reputation is growing here in the United States he is still relatively unknown. It was my luck to have seen him give a lecture that genuinely impressed me. To this day I have not heard anyone articulate such a convincing analysis of cultural production. What I found most persuasive was his adaptation of geographical understandings to depict the flow of ideas, art and other cultural phenomenon from urban centers to the hinterlands, a kind of media colonization that he probably saw firsthand in Jamaica. Of course the materials of culture rarely originate in New York or London. These cultural capitals merely package and distribute the products. The raw materials are mined from the margins (like the Caribbean), transported to the center, transformed as "art" or "novels" and shipped back to the colonies as authentic.

Farm Teams

From a Marxist perspective baseball's farm teams are a naked illustration of capitalist exploitation, a vertical hold on raw talent that snares youth to maintain a constant supply of major league players. Of course the mystifications of capitalist rhetoric would have it otherwise. In films like "The Natural" or "Bull Durham" the minor leaguer is a heroic figure in the best traditions of Soviet realism. Whether they move on to the big time or stay mired in the minors, we are led to believe these men do it for the love of the game.

Now the "feeder" system (a particularly apt metaphor in connection to "farm" teams) has broadened considerably. The baseball industry as a whole (not individual teams) has financed a training camp in the Dominican Republic. The young recruits are given a lengthy introduction to baseball fundamentals, but the training doesn't stop there. The program includes English lessons and a crash course in American culture.

I've seen the Durham Bulls play in Carolina. I've also seen the Canton Indians play at home. Here in Maine Gerda and I watched a Portland Seadogs' game a couple of years ago. They had a snappy young shortstop named Edgar Rentería (the only Colombian that I know of playing in the majors). Six or seven members of the World Series champs first played for the Marlin's Portland farm team. Later in that same 1995 season I saw another one of their games. A few rows away sat retiring Senator William Cohen.

But none of these individuals, none of these teams, none of these theories gripped me the way I was transported by the 1993 Phillies. That team crept up on me with no advance billing. I wasn't interested in their success or failure. I was trying to explain the allure of the game to Carmen. And in so doing I felt like I was grappling with the very nature of this country, its penchant for spectacle, its love affair with big-screen technology and so forth. Through these baseball teams our cities define their identity. And the 1993 Phillies were quite a reflection of Philadelphia. That team had one of everything. Only afterward, in the rapid dissolution of the team over the following seasons, did the full drama of their effort become clear. Virtually the whole outfit was dismantled through injury, trades, or retirements. The only remnant (a mere four years later) is their premiere pitcher Curt Schilling. Mitch Williams (the "Wild Thing") was immediately traded as the scapegoat for the loss. John Kruk was diagnosed with testicular cancer, traded and then retired. Lenny Dykstra left the game with a permanent back injury. The rest were all dealt off to other teams. For that one amazing season that unlikely group put it together.

Carmen broke down just as the Series began in October of 1993. She was barely aware of the games. If she saw any of them I doubt she was able to concentrate long enough to keep track of the score.

Since then stray news of the individual players continues to cross my path. From these scraps I have pieced together a narrative running parallel to a personal logbook of destiny. Neither story is objective. But how much of the game is rational anyway? The players themselves are the most superstitious lot in any sport. Baseball's slow pace allows the mind to wander, to anticipate, and long. It offers up irrational delusions of control as a consolation for something that is often inexplicable. The crowd, the fans, are even more susceptible to this magical thinking.

What a circuitous view I have taken on the Series. But I was reminded of 1993 again when watching two former Phillies, Darren Daulton and Jim Eisenreich, savoring a championship at last. Two old war-horses playing in what will probably be their last hurrahs.

Now that the game has been joined by the Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans, the full measure of U.S. geopolitical influence is reflected. James' study of cricket is a powerful blueprint for the process. But who wants to read such abstractions? Most of us would rather dream, and imagine ourselves out there on the diamond.

-November 1, 1997

Endnotes

ⁱ Joe Torres, "Major League Baseball Hispanic Roster," Hispanic, July-August, 1997.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf