Who’s on deck?

LAST March, the International Baseball Federation held the first World Baseball Classic, a World Cup-style tournament intended to showcase the rising talent of players around the globe. The American team was the favorite, but attentive baseball fans were not too surprised when it didn’t win the championship. After all, the team from the Dominican Republic was astonishing. It included a considerable number of major league all stars, including three recent MVP award-winners and a Cy Young award-winner. As Alan M. Klein points out in his well-researched if clumsily written book, “Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball,” Dominicans are now the largest foreign-born group in U.S. baseball, representing 11% of all major league ballplayers (and the trend is continuing -- Dominicans make up more than 25% of minor leaguers).

So it was surprising when the Dominicans lost too. They were eliminated in the semifinals by Cuba, a country with an excellent baseball tradition (but, due to political sanctions, no major leaguers). The Americans did worse, failing to make it out of group play, suffering ignominious defeats to the Canadians, Koreans and Mexicans. The Japanese, who have long insisted that their style of baseball is superior to the Americans’, beat Cuba to win the title.

A short, high-stakes tournament held in March may not be an ideal way to measure the relative strength of the different nations’ baseball abilities. But the tournament did more than prove that foreign baseball talent can now compete with the best that the U.S. has to offer. The tournament’s high merchandise sales and attendance rate (740,000 tickets sold at seven venues in the U.S., Japan and Puerto Rico in just over two weeks) overwhelmed expectations, demonstrating the game’s enormous popularity in markets outside the U.S. As Klein argues in “Growing the Game,” the sport’s future depends on how smoothly -- and how aggressively -- it can continue this success abroad.

This is because Major League Baseball has relatively little to gain in the U.S. market. The sport’s popularity and profitability have never been higher, but as Klein writes, “the ability of the game to rely upon its domestic base for fans and players has receded to the point where globalizing is imperative.” Cultivating foreign fans and players might seem to be separate endeavors, but they’re not. The best way to advertise baseball abroad is to teach it to a country’s youth and organize student leagues.

Klein devotes a chapter to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are the pioneers and perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of this approach. He traces the Dodgers’ success at acquiring players from untapped markets to Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson. (Though Rickey is most famous for racially integrating baseball, he was also among the first general managers to scout ballplayers in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.)

In 1981, the success of Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela attracted an enormous Latino following, which continues to thrive to this day -- roughly one-third of the 3 million in annual fan attendance at Dodger Stadium identify themselves as Latino. This phenomenon was repeated with an Asian audience in the mid-1990s when the team signed pitcher Hideo Nomo, the first Japanese to play in the major leagues in 30 years. The Dodgers continue to be among the teams that do the most to advertise in foreign markets and sign foreign-born players.

To handle the gargantuan and culturally sensitive task of promoting baseball abroad, MLB created a new division in 1989 called MLB International. MLBI classifies all countries on a three-tier system. Tier one countries are those in which baseball is already popular and profitable (the Dominican Republic, Japan and Mexico). Tier two countries produce very few professional players, and their economic potential is as yet unrealized (Italy, Australia, the Netherlands). Tier three countries like South Africa and Britain are long-term projects but, for the time being, they are considered somewhat hopeless.

It becomes clear from reading Klein’s study that the major problem facing MLBI is the same one hurting the game domestically -- financial inequality. MLBI shares the profits it makes from television licensing fees and merchandise sales equally among all 30 major league baseball teams, but that’s where the illusion of financial parity ends. Major-market teams -- such as the New York Mets and Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the Dodgers -- can send scouts to more locations and sign the best (and highest-salaried) players from tier one countries.

But a team such as the Kansas City Royals has no chance to sign a highly rated Dominican, Puerto Rican or Venezuelan, let alone anyone from Japan. Klein devotes a chapter to the struggles of Allard Baird, then general manager of the Royals, who was forced by this circumstance to use pluck and cleverness to find players undetected by wealthier teams. Unable to compete financially for highly rated prospects in tier one and two countries, Baird focused on South Africa, a country that, as one of Baird’s scouts admitted, is about three decades behind a tier one country in skill levels and knowledge of the game.

When Baird first went to South Africa to hold Royals tryouts, many of the 67 players were girls wearing skirts, only a third of the players had shoes, and only four had gloves. Thirty minutes into the first tryout, Baird decided his time would be better spent teaching the players how to throw a baseball. Although Klein finds nobility in this scene, it’s hard not to view it as almost laughably pathetic in light of what later happened to Baird (and which isn’t part of Klein’s book) -- Baird’s firing in May, partly because of his failure to sign strong prospects. This is not the only place where the book is already dated: Klein discusses the World Baseball Classic only in the book’s final chapter as an intriguing future possibility.

But it’s unclear how far MLB can pursue this strategy of selling its brand abroad, and drafting foreign players, before it becomes necessary for its survival to globalize the sport in a more profound way. Klein suggests one intriguing realignment scenario:

“As futuristic as it sounds, Tokyo, Seoul, Taiwan, and Sydney might be in the same division as Seattle, San Francisco, one Los Angeles team, and San Diego. A Pan-American Division might include Florida, Tampa Bay, Texas, Houston, and Arizona, along with Havana, Monterrey, and Caracas. The remaining major league clubs would be split into an Eastern and a Western Division.”

One wonders where Kansas City would fit in. *

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From Growing the Game

THE buzz around Valenzuela was quickly dubbed “Fernandomania,” an outpouring of attention by fans and media that, in some places, bordered on frenzy. Fernandomania was a nationwide phenomenon that surrounded the entire team. Gone was the pall of intolerance that had hung over Robinson’s and Koufax’s entry into the league. “People just wanted to look at him, touch him, shake his hand,” recalls his manager, Tommy Lasorda. “Fernando set the baseball world on fire in 1981 like something you’d never believe in your life.”