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Such pondering on the moral landscape of baseball's international endeavors creates the most interesting parts of Growing the Game, and redeems some of the more grim economic quantifications. Klein pulls the two themes together in his analysis of the Dodgers as the "most thoroughly cosmopolitan team in the game." He notes, in his revisitation of Branch Rickey's motives in calling up Jackie Robinson in 1947 (a story which, in all its iterations, continues to be one of the most moving to me in all of American history), that "The racial integration of baseball was built upon the same principles that globalization relies upon: expansion of boundaries, a relatively high degree of merit, and social openness." Though this might seem like revisionist economics with a nod to the moral sphere, I think Klein is trying to point out here, as elsewhere, that economics can serve to augment justice and not just as a guise for exploitation. So also in his treatment of the deep-rooted presence of Major League scouts and academies in the Dominican Republic (and some other third-world settings), Klein tends to curb the notion that this is imperialist enslavement wearing cleats and ball-caps. Instead, he offers a sympathetic reading, such as in his suggestion that Dominican teens are justified in leaving school to enter even as long-shots in one of the baseball academies: "The correlation between education and employment is negligible in this country, so the preoccupation Dominican youth have with baseball is a rational response to an irrational problem."
For Klein, the prospect of Major League Baseball as a truly international economic juggernaut is harrowing, if an eye is not kept upon the cultural and even moral implications. Hence, he notes that "For Major League Baseball to become a global force it will take more than sophisticated technology and advanced marketing; it will take a global view in which MLB grows by reducing in dependence on strict economic and political control. MLB will actually have to decenter somewhat." Here, here!
These themes of justice, of cultural hope and identity, to which Klein often alludes, are more fully and widely treated in the anthology Baseball Without Borders. George Gmelch, an anthropologist from Union College in New York, is also a former minor league player, with experience both in the U.S. and abroad, who has written extensively on the game. This book deals less with the economic issues of professionalization, and more with the delightfully idiosyncratic elements of baseball in its diverse and sundry manifestations around the world. I found myself fascinated by the historical ephemera (baseball was not only in Japan and China by the 1880s, but also in England and Australia, locked in an feud with the cricketeers!), but more so by what Gmelch calls, in his introduction, "culture influencing the nuances of the sport."
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