It first came to my attention last Spring in the World Baseball Classic tournament. I noticed the players taking enormous pride in playing under the banner of their national heritage; whether they were native to these competing countries or first and second generation American-born, celebrating their birthright playing on their ancestral team. I found their enthusiasm refreshing, their sense of family and kinship enhanced by the presence of countrymen. One country, one flag, one language, one people, one purpose. Homogeneous.
On February 28th of this year, Major League Baseball’s mlb.com website published a projection of the starting lineups we could look forward to in 2018 for each of the thirty clubs. They listed likely batting orders for position players, 9 in the American League and 8 in the National League, projected for each team. A veritable fan’s guide that peeks into the new season. Now to say this is a preliminary assessment is an understatement. There will be injuries, trades, free agent signings; rookies who surprise and veterans who retire that will all impact these projections prior to Opening Day’s first pitch.
Still, for a baseball enthusiast, perusing the rosters and potential lineups is a guilty pleasure. And that is when I realized how multi-national major league ball players had become. I counted 255 everyday starting position players listed. I then clicked on each player’s bio to discover his place of birth. My survey is by no means scientific, as it is but a snapshot in time, yet there is no denying that it is telling. 91 out of 255 of the starting position players (35.7%) were listed as foreign-born. I counted 13 countries plus the US territory of Puerto Rico as contributing homegrown players to MLB rosters. Two-thirds of them come from the Dominican Republic (30) and Venezuela (31). Again, this does not include pitchers or reserve and utility players, as I did not drill down the entire roster for each team; I just noted what was listed for the birthplace of the everyday position players. But it is a safe assumption that those not researched would have a comparable, if not greater, representation of foreign-born vs. American-born players. After all, second-tier pitchers and bench players are the lesser-paid ballplayers, and more lower-paid players are signed off of the sandlots of the Caribbean than Ivy League campuses. At least I think that’s true. I don’t have empirical data to back that up, except to say that it makes sense.
But compensation inequity is really my point. For decades when conservatives would argue that immigration, both legal and illegal, costs jobs and depress wages, the left would counter that immigrants do the jobs Americans are unwilling to do. For years the pro-immigration groups have conjured up the image of fruit pickers, landscapers, janitors and chambermaids, doing the so-called “back-breaking work” Americans eschew, making immigrants an essential cog in the wheel of our great economy. It all fit together nicely; the GOP liked the status quo because big business got its cheap labor source, and the progressive left could continue pushing for the rights of the underclass to come out of the shadows and vote Democratic. One side bought off, one side sold out. What passes nowadays as a win-win.
Yet I look at the MLB rosters and say can teams not find an American kid to play shortstop for the Mets? Can they not find a catcher for the Cubs or a center fielder for the Phillies? There are 88 other examples out of 255 jobs. That’s a 35% attrition rate of American jobs in one segment of one business. Isn’t it likely the talent located in the international market is comparable and cheaper than home grown talent? Are major league teams coveting this arena of cheap labor? It seems they do because they go to great lengths to preserve their self-imposed spending caps for international player signing bonuses called a Bonus Pool. Teams have about $5M in bonus pool money to lure international players into signing player contracts. Teams husband this resource so closely that they’ll even trade a player to another team in exchange for acquiring some that team’s bonus pool to increase their own!
Are the immigrants brought here by MLB taking American jobs and depressing wages? In the MLB draft, college players command hefty signing bonuses, often six and seven-figure payouts. In the sandlots of the poverty-stricken Dominican Republic, a major league team can sign twenty teens for $10K each and bring them to the US, depositing them into the grist mill of minor league baseball. If one out of the twenty makes it, great. If the other nineteen wash out, small potatoes. Still way under what it costs to sign one first round collegiate from Wisconsin. But this stockpiling of international prospects makes it all the more difficult for an American kid from a junior college to get a look.
And how exactly is MLB managing to get work visas and green cards for players from places like Venezuela and Cuba? How well are these young people vetted for criminal backgrounds and ties to drug cartels? How vital is it that we import ballplayers from Communist countries? How deep do the MLB hooks go into the State Department to make all this happen?
And what are we getting on the field in exchange for dispensing with American-born ballplayers? The baseball commissioner bemoans how slow the game moves, but seems to tolerate meetings at the mound that involve multiple players conversing in multiple dialects, and the manager visiting with an interpreter. Are we getting role models for our children? Hardly. Hero-worship can’t happen if the player cannot speak English, establish a persona a kid can relate to via mingling with fans, handling interviews and through community service. To be sure, many players do participate in worthy causes that elevate their profile, but others do not, be it due to their language difficulties or lack of assimilation. This can result from an eagerness to recruit production over character, ignoring the finer points, and bringing the by-product of the slums of the Latin America and the Caribbean: a bejeweled, tattooed, pierced, nouveau-riche narcissist athlete with an unbuttoned shirt and a hat cocked sideways who interacts poorly with fans, collects wealth beyond measure in his life experience, and demonstrates little in terms of publicly expressed gratitude for the game and the country. It’s troubling that he’d rather play for Curacao or Columbia in the World Baseball Classic, then abscond back to his native village where he is feted by the locals while half his newly acquired wealth is spent on private security so his mother isn’t kidnapped for ransom. Until, of course, MLB can arrange visas for the whole family.
And is MLB the only business out there, scouting the globe for specialized talent that can be acquired on the cheap? The evidence would say no. Major news stories have reported the inequities of Silicon Valley recruiting Pakistani tech workers to displace higher-paid American workers, and US hospitals offering resident positions to doctors from India at a lower wage than Americans graduated from our best universities. Is this what all the flowery talk of globalization and diversity really comes down to?
The left can talk all they want about lettuce-pickers and day laborers, but the truth is the US is becoming a nation of displaced workers at every end of the spectrum. Artificial Intelligence will replace the menial jobs at first, then move on to supplanting manufacturing jobs. Immigration, legal or illegal, and irrespective of what prevails among merit-based, lotteries, and chain migration, will inevitably erode American jobs regardless. All while we’re sold a bill of goods by the left.
I don’t know how it will all shake out, but I’d sure like to see a return to the spirit shown in the World Baseball Classic. Where players played for their home team. The USA included.
Source:
https://www.mlb.com/news/projected-2018-lineups-for-all-30-mlb-teams/c-266895088