Growing the Game
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The Globalization of Major League Baseball
Alan M. Klein
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Format: PaperPrice: $29.00
Baseball fans are well aware that the game has become increasingly international. Major league rosters include players from no fewer than fourteen countries, and more than one-fourth of all players are foreign born. Here, Alan Klein offers the first full-length study of a sport in the process of globalizing. Looking at the international activities of big-market and small-market baseball teams, as well as the Commissioner’s Office, he examines the ways in which Major League Baseball operates on a world stage that reaches from the Dominican Republic to South Africa to Japan.
The origins of baseball’s efforts to globalize are complex, stemming as much from decreasing opportunities at home as from promise abroad. The book chronicles attempts to develop the game outside the United States, the strategies that teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals have devised to recruit international talent, and the ways baseball has been growing in other countries. The author concludes with an assessment of the obstacles that may inhibit or promote baseball’s progress toward globalization, offering thoughtful proposals to ensure the health and growth of the game in the United States and abroad.
"This is an excellent book, from a first rate scholar who combines theoretical and empirical insights to produce an engaging look into the development of baseball across the globe."—Joseph Maguire, author of Power and Global Sport
"Klein enters an important and exciting area of research and is the first to focus on the globalization of baseball. Growing the Game will be a landmark contribution."—Milton Jamail, author of Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball
“Well-researched.”—Nathaniel Rich, Los Angeles Times
"[This] informative . . . book subtitled The Globalization of Major League Baseball, focuses on the still relatively new initiatives in Latin America, Asia, Australia, Europe and South Africa of the Kansas Royals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Major League Baseball International, a division of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Barron’s
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
