Take Me Out to <i> El Beisbol</i> : SUGARBALL; The American Game, The Dominican Dream <i> By Alan M. Klein (Yale University Press: $19.95; 224 pp.) </i>

Baseball may have been invented in America, but the place where it’s really the national pastime is the Dominican Republic. And at its best, “Sugarball,” Alan Klein’s quirkly study of Dominican baseball, offers us an opportunity to see how a radically different culture has embraced an American game.

Time, for instance, is elastic. Dominican games rarely begin on time and often are interrupted between innings--even between at-bats--by noisy displays of merengue music and enthusiastic dancing in the stands. Children roam the dugouts and wander onto the field. Transvestites dance on top of the dugouts. Teams often hire a brujo (witch) to cast a spell on their opponents.

A Dominican seventh-inning stretch is a dramatic affair: When a Licey Tigers game reaches the home half of the seventh inning, a young man with a stuffed tiger strapped to his back dashes onto the field, runs the bases and slides into home plate, encouraged by cheers from the crowd.

Klein, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University, is interested in more than local color. In fact, what makes “Sugarball” so intriguing is that Klein sees baseball (which began as a seasonal diversion for sugar-cane cutters and grew in popularity as U.S. economic domination of the Dominican Republic increased) as a symbol of the country’s uneasy battle against colonialism.

Which means that the Dominicans’ adoration of the game always will be complicated by the often acrimonious history between the two nations.

As early as 1914, for instance, when Babe Ruth was still an obscure minor-league pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, the idol of the Dominican Republic was Enrique (El Indio Bravo) Hernandez. He too was a pitcher, the ace hurler for Nuevo Club, the country’s reigning baseball team.

Hernandez’s star status was assured when he pitched a no-hitter against a particularly formidable foe--a team of Americans from the U.S. Navy cruiser Washington.

The victory had immense symbolic significance, especially in a country that was to endure two separate invasions by the U.S. Marines, first in 1916 (to recover customs revenues) and again in 1965 (to support a military junta that had overthrown the elected left-wing government).

The U.S. State Department certainly saw baseball as a valuable counterrevolutionary force. As early as 1913, an American minister to the Dominican Republic wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan: “The remarkable effect of this outlet for the animal spirits of the young men is that they are leaving the plazas where they were in the habit of congregating and talking revolution and are resorting to the ball fields. . . . It satisfies a craving in the nature of the people for exciting conflict and is a real substitute for the contest in the hillsides with rifles.”

According to Klein, this attitude survives today. Only now, instead of Gulf & Western looking to the Dominican Republic for sugar and other raw materials, major-league baseball scours the countryside searching for all-star shortstops. (There are nearly 60 Dominican players in the majors--and probably would be more if not for a little-known Department of Labor edict that restricts each team to 24 visas for Latin players in its organization.)

The United States certainly hasn’t been alone in using baseball for its own ends. In 1937, when the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, found himself under fire from growing political opposition, he decided to enhance his prestige by winning the Dominican pennant. (His brother and sister owned Licey, one of the country’s oldest teams.)

Looking for ringers, Trujillo financed a raid on the American Negro League. Soon all the Dominican teams were immersed in a heated bidding war, which brought to the island such legendary black ballplayers as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell.

Klein quotes one account where the American players’ defeat prompted Trujillo’s police to fire their guns in the air, shouting, “The President doesn’t like to lose.” When Trujillo received reports that his highly paid American recruits were out carousing to all hours, he simply had them spend the night in jail.

Fans today who have come to view baseball players as pampered, overpaid starlets may find it hard to imagine the intense, familial relationship that Dominican fans have with their local heroes. This fervent loyalty still remains, even for a hothead like former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Joaquin Andujar.

Whenever an American sportswriter would ask Andujar a difficult question, he would respond, with a menacing glare: “I am one tough Dominican.” But in his hometown of San Pedro de Macoris, an insult to Andujar was an insult to the entire community. Pitching for San Pedro one winter, Andujar had a rocky outing and was sent to the dugout by his manager. After the game, the fans followed the manager to the parking lot and threw stones at his car.

You don’t see many big names playing for San Pedro any more. Now that Dominican stars like George Bell and Pedro Guerrero make upwards of $3 million a year playing in the major leagues, they rarely participate in winter ball, which is played by a six-team Dominican league from November through the end of January. Still, the local press lionizes them, supplying breathless accounts of their Stateside achievements each summer.

Pascual Perez merits a headline simply when he’s scheduled to pitch. When the Toronto Blue Jays won a game thanks to 10 RBIs from American players, the Dominican paper Listin Diario focused on the heroics of George Bell and Manny Lee, who combined for three singles.

Clearly this signals the immense pride Dominicans take in their countrymen’s achievements. But is this, as Klein sees it, really a form of cultural resistance? It’s a daunting thesis, especially when Klein attempts to prove that Dominican sportswriters’ occasional anti-American tirades are a reaction to American hegemony.

Klein’s research is impressive, and his analysis of America’s influence on Dominican baseball is provocative. It’s not often that you find a baseball book quoting liberally from Claude Levi-Strauss and Bertolt Brecht.

But Klein’s parched, often convoluted prose reads like a grad-school seminar paper. And he burdens his book with too much ivory-tower analysis, even comparing the symbolic importance of insignias on Dominican baseball caps to the paintings in Plains Indians tepees.

Klein is on safer ground when he leaves his sociological theories at home and heads for the ballpark. There he finds ingenious ticket scalpers (operating with the tacit consent of management), bookies (who take bets on every pitch) and exuberant vendors who chat, flirt and let customers run a tab during the course of the game, collecting their earnings at its conclusion.

When one shady character tries to slip away without paying, Klein observes the tiny, pregnant vendor blocking his exit “like a mongoose confronting a cobra . . . pushing him with her low-slung belly, not only demanding the money due but ridiculing him in front of the fans, who began to berate him.”

That’s what makes Dominican baseball so singular. By the end of “Sugarball,” even Klein, with all his ideological fondness for theories of American hegemony and Third-World cultural resistance, allows himself to be wooed by the sheer romance of the game.

“A milk carton can be flattened into a mitt,” he writes, describing the makeshift implements that Dominican boys use in their sandlot games. “A tree branch or sugar cane stalk can be fashioned into a bat. These become powerful symbols of success against seemingly insurmountable odds. Not only does their poverty fail to detract from their accomplishments and dreams, but it adds to their sense of pride.”

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Sugarball,” see the Opinion section, Page 1.