Synopses & Reviews
The colliding histories of black and Latin ballplayers in the major leagues have traditionally been told as a story of their shameful segregation and redemptive integration. Jackie Robinson jumped baseball's color line to much fanfare, but integration was painful as well as triumphal. It gutted the once-vibrant Negro Leagues and often subjected Latin players to Jim Crow racism. Today, Major League Baseball tightens its grasp around the Caribbean's burgeoning baseball academies, while at home it embraces, and exploits, the legacy of the Negro Leagues.
After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth — a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over a quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explains the catalyst for this sea change; he also breaks down the consequences that cut across society. Integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.
By looking at this history from the vantage point of black America and the Caribbean, a more complex story comes into focus, one largely missing from traditional narratives of baseball's history. Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth: baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker as a game.
Review
"One of our greatest historians of sport has given us a gift for the ages: a history of baseball that captures its multicultural dynamics in original and profoundly illuminating ways. Synthesizing a lifetime of pathbreaking research, Raceball presents a brilliant new account — in black, white, and brown — of what can no longer be regarded as merely the national game." Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship
Review
"I became a serious baseball fan in the mid-1950s, when my mother took me to the Polo Grounds to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants. The loudest cheers at that hulking old stadium in central Harlem were for a quartet of black men -- Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella who played for Brooklyn, and Willie Mays who starred for the Giants. Most of the fans my mother and I sat among were also African-Americans. Many seemed delighted that a little white boy was rooting just as loudly for the rival Dodgers as they were." Michael Kazin, The New Republic (Read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
Introduction One The Gospel of Baseball
Two Blackball’s Heyday
Three A Latin Challenge
Four The Winds of War
Five Integration’s Curse
Six ¡Viva México!
Seven New Caribbean Currents
Eight Whiteout
Nine The Rise of the Academies
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Synopsis
From an award-winning writer, the first linked history of African Americans and Latinos in Major League Baseball.
About the Author
Rob Ruck teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Author of Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh and The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic, his documentary work includes the Emmy Award–winning Kings on the Hill: Baseball's Forgotten Men. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Maggie Patterson, his coauthor for Rooney: A Sporting Life.