Les Payne

March 20, 2009

Updated - March 23, 2009

As with the auto industry, America is in danger of losing its “national pastime” due to the outsourcing of jobs abroad and the importing of baseball players at home.

The best baseball is no longer played in the U.S. by Americans. This point was driven home in the World Baseball Classic Sunday night when Team USA lost to Japan, 9-4, in Los Angeles.

Japan, the reigning champs, could claim bragging rights but its culture eschews such vain displays. So does South Korea whose team won the baseball championship at the ‘08 Olympics - and faces Japan in the finals. Venezuela might also vie for the mantle but it would stir hemispheric tensions with Cuba where baseball is nothing short of a national passion.

By losing to Japan Wednesday, Cuba damaged the most storied record in global baseball. The island team had won 42 of its 50 international contests since 1952, finishing second 8 times and thus never settling even for third place in more than a half century.

As for the inventor of baseball, the U.S. took a Hollywood drubbing over the weekend in, well, Hollywood .

This globalization of baseball is all good. It's better for nations to pick their opponents off first-base than to bean them with roadside bombs. But, as Japan, Venezuela and Korea battle the U.S. for supremacy, a few domestic concerns circle the bases—troubling concerns reflected in other industries across the U.S. economy. 

Several teams at the World Baseball Classic, including Japan and Venezuela, were stocked by players who earn millions in the U.S. Major Leagues. These teams, including Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, were notably represented by Major Leaguers who chose to play under their home-country flags.

Of the 1,371 players on the 30 Major League team rosters, some 37 percent are foreign born, according to the ’08 Baseball Atlas. Topping the list are: the Dominican Republic with 137, Venezuela with 89, Mexico 25, Japan 20 and Cuba 14.

Has America endangered its baseball primacy by overlooking its best talent to train and fill key jobs with immigrant, albeit well-paid, workers?

The U.S. State Department rationale offered for importing foreign workers is that they perform services that Americans refuse to perform. Not so with baseball. More important, there seems to be a concerted effort afoot to steer certain elite American athletes toward other sports—and away from this “national pastime.”

A few years ago, The New York Times documented the stark reduction of African American baseball players at the college level. The four teams that ended up in the '05 College World Series -- Texas , Florida , Arizona State and Baylor -- had only four African-American players among them. By contrast, the teams in the final four of the NCAA basketball finals had more than 10 times as many black players. Correspondingly, professional baseball rosters have thinned from 19 percent African American in 1995, according to a study by the University of Central Florida, to less than 8 percent last year. 

This thinning of the black American baseball roster is attributable in part to a disparity in athletic scholarships that attracted more, middle–class white students to baseball. While college baseball programs generally offered athletes only partial scholarships, football and basketball had full-expense grants that effectively attracted black athletes disproportionately, many of whom were the first in their family to attend college.

Beyond the reach of NCAA rules, pro-baseball agents recruit cheaper foreign workers because they provide a larger initial profit margin and attract an additional audience of Hispanics and Asians to the stadiums and the global TV market.

The Sunday loss out west may well reflect what the masters of the universe have done to the overall economy of the USA, and much for the same reason: shortsightedness, tribalism and greed.