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What: “Away Games: The Life and Times of a Latin Baseball Player” by Marcos Breton and Jose Luis Villegas.

Price: $23

Miguel Tejada, like Sammy Sosa before him, was born hungry. It’s a trait many Dominicans share. That and an incomparable talent for baseball. And not surprisingly, both spring from the same fount.

Malnourished at birth, the eighth child in a desperately poor family living in a shantytown, Tejada started work at an age kids in this country start kindergarten. And then he found baseball. For Tejada, the sport quickly became more than a game. It became a way out of poverty.

Marcos Breton, a senior writer at the Sacramento Bee, and Jose Luis Villegas, a staff photographer at the paper, tell the story of the thousands of Dominican players who have faced that challenge by following the improbable journey of Tejada, who reached the major leagues with the Oakland A’s late in the summer of 1997.

At times the authors pull back from their tight focus on one player to place the story in context. One chapter explores the racism and language problems the earliest Latin players faced in the U.S., while in other places the book looks at the fates that befell once-promising players who didn’t make it.

Nearly one in five of today’s major leaguers were born in Latin America, and many followed the same difficult path as Tejada. Many more never reached the big leagues, and this book is as much their story as it is Tejada’s.