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How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game
Beacon Press
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
220 pages
ISBN: 0807048054
EAN: 9780807048054
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From an award-winning writer, the first linked history of
African Americans and Latinos in Major League
Baseball
The colliding histories of
black and Latin ballplayers in the major leagues have
traditionally been told as a story of their shameful
segregation and redemptive integration. Jackie Robinson
jumped baseball’s color line to much fanfare, but
integration was painful as well as triumphal. It gutted the
once-vibrant Negro Leagues and often subjected Latin players
to Jim Crow racism. Today, Major League Baseball tightens
its grasp around the Caribbean’s burgeoning baseball
academies, while at home it embraces, and exploits, the
legacy of the Negro Leagues.
After peaking
at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African
Americans now make up less than one-tenth—a decline
unimaginable in other men’s pro sports. The number of Latin
Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over a quarter of
all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the
minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explains
the catalyst for this sea change; he also breaks down the
consequences that cut across society. Integration cost black
and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting
lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for
the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes
into major league baseball, integration did little for the
communities they left behind.
By looking at
this history from the vantage point of black America and the
Caribbean, a more complex story comes into focus, one
largely missing from traditional narratives of baseball’s
history. Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth:
baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker
as a game.
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