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When you awaken in early March to two degrees below zero, and your first glance out the front window reveals a Stonehenge-like hunk of ice left by the snowplow at the end of the driveway, baseball's springtime revels might as well be on the other side of the world. That's how I've been feeling this "spring," an alien to my own native sport, which, unfolding in muggy Florida and arid Arizona, is as fantastically distant on the newspaper pages as the reports of foreign correspondents seven time zones away.

 So, it seems apt that my readings for this spring training review were centered on global baseball. All readers who have wearied of unending discourses about globalization, global reach and scope, "new global realities," please don't abandon ship at this point. I, too, approach the topic warily, and so there were moments in the reading of Alan M. Klein's Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball (Yale Univ. Press, 2006) where I felt the utilitarian shadow of "expand or die" creeping over the pastoral baseball scene I try always to keep in my mind's eye.

 Yet, as I worked my way through Klein's text, and especially through the volume Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006), edited by George Gmelch, I began to see a human face, or rather myriad human faces, to this global game, faces mirroring my own face at ten years old, dedicated and dreamy and hopeful that I could become a more lithe version of my hero, Thurman Munson. What becomes clear is that, though the business of baseball will affect who plays and how, the question of why people play will continue to be bound up in deeper human aspirations.

But as for the business side of things, I come away from both books thinking that the enduring hopefulness and frequent despair so bound up in the game itself, a game of failed chances and near misses and excruciating tensions, is a helpful way of thinking of the professional baseball's economic realities around the world as well. Klein sets out in his introduction that "The questions to be answered have to do with whether or no Major League Baseball has embarked on a path that will promote well-being of the game and the view of it as a socially progressive visitor in other quarters. To determine this we will have to put aside our fondness for the game and consider it as both an economic effort and a form of social engineering." My hesitation to "lay aside [my] fondness for the game" puts me on edge in the face of the talk of "the turbo-Darwinian stamp" of the global economy, not to mention the crisis of "Structural problems affecting the reproduction of both the fan base and the player ranks." I find myself among the "older purists" whose demographic will not be able to buoy up Major League Baseball too far into the 21st century. I bristle at being deemed part of the problem. Where is Ray Liotta, I mean Shoeless Joe, whispering "I'd have played for food money… . I'd have played for nothing"?

 Klein's text takes a refreshing turn, though, when he begins to lay out his read of the global landscape for baseball, and he thus reveals that he, too, is among the 'purists,' among those enamored not by the economics of the game but by its core narrative, its cultural embodiments that may or may not translate into money. So, when he spends a chapter lauding the Kansas City Royals operation, not just as a model of small-market struggle but as a place where baseball intuitions still trump the "moneyball" histrionics of Oakland's Billy Beane. Hence Royals G.M. Allard Baird is seen as "hands-on; a scout lurks in his mind, and he is as intuitive as Beane is rational." Furthermore, Kansas City's nurturing of such a rudimentary baseball nation as South Africa is seen as a move, not of economic desperation so much as of hope and possibility. Hence, though few major league prospects have arisen there, the sheer newness of the sport means that "baseball has beaten the taint of racism that haunts the country." Despite intense market pressure for the products (South African ballplayers) to maximize potential (appear in Major League baseball), Klein notes that a more important sub-theme is at work, namely that "in South Africa there exists one of those rare synergistic moments where being responsible is good for all parties." Though the Royals aren't there as a non-profit agency for cultural renewal, and though their venture there seems absurd in the eyes of many Major League clubs, they are accomplishing something unique, in the eyes of MLB executive Jim Small: "baseball—and I hesitate to say this because I don't want to give baseball more credit than it deserves—is helping in its own small way to rebuild a nation."

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