Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice is a fascinating account of the ongoing transnationalization of baseball in the Dominican Republic (DR), as it chronicles the contentious relationship between Major League Baseball (MLB) and Dominican baseball over the past thirty years. Alan Klein tells an important story because Dominican baseball is today a major supplier of players to the MLB. This means, of course, that Dominican baseball, in turn, has changed dramatically as it responds to powerful MLB influences and demands. The plot of Klein’s story is structured around the concept of the global commodity chain. The transnational battle, then, is over the question of who should and will control Dominican player development, training, and contract negotiations, and by whom the island game should be regulated and managed. The story pits the powerful and mostly villainous figure of the MLB against the underdog Dominican buscones, the island’s baseball scouts and business wheeler-dealers. Klein’s achievement in telling the story this way is to highlight the point of view and interests of Dominican contenders for their piece of the baseball pie. This is, for North American readers, a largely unrepresented perspective, and as such makes a …show more content…
The book is particularly effective in unpacking and critiquing MLB’s self-presentation as the moral reformer of Dominican corruption. Many of Klein’s defenses of Dominican practices against MLB critiques are insightful and persuasive. For example, his argument that ethnocentric claims that the baseball industry exploits youth by enticing them to sacrifice a secure future by staying in school are ill-suited to the realities of the Dominican Republic, with its much lower returns of education on economic opportunity, is