While football isn’t letting go of its title as “America’s passion” anytime soon, there’s a reason why baseball continues to embody America better than any other sport. It’s the story of triumph surrounded by ugliness-history that, while beautiful, goes out of its way to hide the whole story.
We hear much about the great game and its storied history, but what about the other story? What about the history that isn’t whitewashed? “Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game” aims to share that side of the story, and does so in the best way possible. Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck’s book is America personified, right down to the obstacles faced by ethnic minorities who try to assert autonomy over their future.
Weaving together political history, sports history and racial history, Ruck demonstrates how baseball, like America, extended its tentacles out to the Caribbean and Mexico in order to protect its own interests, battled other leagues in other countries for players, tried to assert its own rules and regulations in other nations and, when they did integrate, did so on their terms and in a way that inadvertently hurt the groups it invited to the party.
“Raceball” meticulously constructs the histories of the Negro Leagues and the various leagues in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba and tells how each league interacted with each other. Ruck details the various dictatorships in the Caribbean (some sponsored by the American government) and how they played a role in shaping the identity of nations around the sport of baseball.
He also chronicles the development of the Negro Leagues from the late 19th century to its unceremonious demise post-Jackie Robinson. Presenting the culture of the Jim Crow-era South and how it shaped the great Black migration north, Ruck further demonstrates how baseball is so closely connected to American history.
But “Raceball” isn’t only about the rise, it’s also about the fall and how the decline of Black representation has led many young Black Americans to consider baseball a “white sport.”
In the end, “Raceball” shows how baseball in the Caribbean was able to remain somewhat autonomous simply by being far enough away from MLB’s reach to completely colonize it. Blacks weren’t able to handle the post-integration shift from the Negro Leagues to Major League Baseball due to its image of tradition and conservatism, baseball costing more money to play, Little Leagues shifting to the suburbs and the rise of fatherless homes in the Black community.
With recent films like “Sugar” and books like “The Bullpen Gospels” receiving attention, add “Raceball” to the list of media and art that’s finally telling the full story without the “Field of Dreams” sugarcoating. If you’re a fan of baseball or just a fan of North American history without the white blind spots, this book is highly recommended.
