A whole new ballgame

A LITTLE MORE THAN A century ago, the exasperated father of one baseball-loving immigrant boy appealed to the advice columnist of the Jewish Daily Forward for help. “What is the point of a crazy game like baseball?” he asked. “The children can get crippled. I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American.” The columnist’s reply? Let him play. Or rather: “Don’t let your child grow up to be a stranger in his own country.”

For most of its 150-plus-year history, baseball has been, as Walt Whitman once succinctly put it, “America’s Game.” Immigrants could stay up all night studying the names of presidents and state capitals; if they really wanted to fit in, though, their time would be better spent learning the strike zone.

America was a nation of immigrants, and so the major leagues were filled with them, but for a long time nothing much was made of the fact. Over the years, a small handful of superstars came to hold a special place in the collective hearts of their respective ethnic communities, yet baseball was, first and foremost, the national pastime, a democratizing institution that blurred ethnic backgrounds rather than highlighting them.

Few of the euphoric New York Giants fans who charged onto the field of the Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951, for instance, knew that Bobby Thomson, who had just hit the most famous home run in the history of the game, was born in Scotland. Fewer still cared. And you can be equally sure that Thomson’s so-called Shot Heard ‘Round the World was not, in fact, heard back in his hometown of Glasgow.

Contrast this with last summer’s Home Run Derby, newly reformatted as an international competition rather than a strictly individual one. No sooner had Bobby Abreu’s winning blast cleared the fence than two of his fellow countrymen, Johan Santana and Miguel Cabrera, rushed onto the field to drape him in an enormous Venezuelan flag. According to Santana, who called his father at home in Venezuela afterward, the country was “paralyzed” with joy.

And now we have the inaugural World Baseball Classic, the clearest sign yet that baseball has entered a new era, one in which the game’s cultural diversity and growing international appeal are phenomena to be celebrated -- and, inasmuch as possible, commercially exploited. The WBC is, above all, a global marketing initiative, Major League Baseball’s most ambitious effort yet to reach prospective fans abroad.

The free market, in the form of talent-hungry individual franchises, has already cleared the path. Big-league clubs have been trolling Latin America for prospects pretty much since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947; today most teams have scouts across the Pacific Rim and in Europe and Australia too.

A number of franchises now factor the ethnicity of their rosters into marketing decisions. Before the 2005 season, when the Mets acquired two of the game’s most luminous Latin American stars, Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran, the team’s Dominican-born general manager, Omar Minaya, spoke unabashedly about building the Mets’ brand among New York’s Hispanic community as well as in Latin America. With the help of a dedicated Spanish-language advertising campaign for “Los Mets,” attendance rose sharply last year despite the team’s mediocre performance on the field.

Most of Major League Baseball’s previous attempts to go global have been more halfhearted and less successful. To the displeasure of bleary-eyed fans and jet-lagged players, baseball scheduled the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to open the 2004 season with a two-game set in Tokyo. And then there was the Olympics debacle.

Having persuaded the International Olympic Committee to include baseball as a medal sport at the Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992, Major League Baseball quickly ran afoul of the committee for its failure to institute adequate drug testing and its unwillingness to interrupt the regular season in order to allow the country’s best players to compete. Things came to a head at an IOC vote last summer, when baseball became the first medal sport to be dumped by the Olympics since polo -- in 1936. Undeterred, Commissioner Bud Selig unveiled the 2006 World Baseball Classic -- “the most important international baseball event ever staged,” as he described it -- at baseball’s winter meetings in December. The games got underway a couple of days ago in Japan.

Sixteen nations are competing, including Cuba, which was initially barred from traveling to the U.S. by the Treasury Department before promising to donate all of its share of ticket sales and broadcast advertising to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Teams have been grouped into four pools, with the two winners to play for the championship March 20 in San Diego. Aside from the U.S. and Japanese teams, the vast majority of the talent resides in the handful of Latin American teams, which is hardly surprising considering that 37% of players under contract to major league clubs are Latino.

The WBC hasn’t generated much enthusiasm here. Although it was supported by all but one team owner -- the New York Yankees’ peevish George Steinbrenner, naturally -- as well as the players’ union, most clubs and many players were wary of the injury risk. The list of players who have dropped out is long. It includes the game’s biggest superstar, Barry Bonds, who explained the decision to USA Today with typical diplomacy: “Come on, the World Cup isn’t the Olympics. Who cares? Does it mean anything?”

Baseball’s TV network partner, Fox, declined the television rights, and plenty of tickets are still available for the games to be played in the U.S., including several at Angel Stadium in Anaheim. But Major League Baseball will judge the tournament not by how well it fares here but how well it fares abroad.

To that end, players have been encouraged to help equalize the competitive balance. To qualify to play for a particular nation, one need only have a parent who was either born or has citizenship there. This bit of gerrymandering has created a predictably amusing spectacle: A number of players will be donning the colors of countries they probably couldn’t find on a map.

It is easy to be cynical, and many baseball fans are. At the same time, though, by encouraging players with complicated backgrounds to contemplate their ethnic identities, the World Baseball Classic has, however unwittingly, shed some unexpected light on the American immigrant experience. Alex Rodriguez, the reigning American League most valuable player, was born in New York to two Dominican parents; for several weeks he said he couldn’t decide whether to play for the United States or the Dominican Republic. When A-Rod eventually chose the U.S., Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, who is from Venezuela, doubted his ambivalence, telling Sports Illustrated that Rodriguez had just been sucking up to Latinos: “He knew he wasn’t going to play for the Dominicans; he’s not a Dominican!”

Guillen (who later apologized) is entitled to his opinion, but it seems just as likely that Rodriguez, an unusually introspective ballplayer -- he went public last year with the news that he saw a therapist -- was truly torn. He may have felt more American than Dominican, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t genuinely drawn to the world of his parents. Indeed, this ebb and flow is a central feature of immigrant life in the United States; one generation strives to assimilate, the next longs to return.

Consider a pair of Italian American ballplayers, Joe DiMaggio, the son of a poor Sicilian who immigrated to San Francisco and proceeded to scratch out a living fishing on the wharf, and Mike Piazza, whose father owned a multimillion-dollar car dealership franchise in suburban Philadelphia. Had the WBC been around in DiMaggio’s day, he would no doubt have insisted on playing for the United States; after all, he enlisted in the Army to fight with the Allied forces against, among other Axis countries, Italy.

Piazza had his choice of the two, and chose to bat cleanup for Italy. And he’s already talking about moving there to coach the national team after he retires. Long a metaphorical bridge into the New World, baseball may yet prove to be a bridge back to the Old World.