PROFESSIONAL SPORT 100Campeones Text.Qxp 8/31/10 8:12 PM Page 12 100Campeones Text.Qxp 8/31/10 8:12 PM Page 13
100Campeones_Text.qxp 8/31/10 8:12 PM Page 11 PROFESSIONAL SPORT 100Campeones_Text.qxp 8/31/10 8:12 PM Page 12 100Campeones_Text.qxp 8/31/10 8:12 PM Page 13 2 LATINOS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL by Richard Lapchick A few years ago, Jayson Stark wrote, “Baseball isn’t just America’s sport anymore” for ESPN.com. He concluded that, “What is actu- ally being invaded here is America and its hold on its theoretical na- tional pastime. We’re not sure exactly when this happened—possi- bly while you were busy watching a Yankees-Red Sox game—but this isn’t just America’s sport anymore. It is Latin America’s sport.” While it may not have gone that far yet, the presence of Latino players in baseball, especially in Major League Baseball, has grown enormously. In 1990, the Racial and Gender Report Card recorded that 13 percent of MLB players were Latino. In the 2009 MLB Racial and Gender Report Card, 27 percent of the players were La- tino. The all-time high was 29.4 percent in 2006. Teams from South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean enter the World Baseball Classic with superstar MLB players on their ros- ters. Stark wrote, “The term, ‘baseball game,’ won’t be adequate to describe it. These games will be practically a cultural symposium— where we provide the greatest Latino players of our time a monstrous stage to demonstrate what baseball means to them, versus what baseball now means to us.” American youth have an array of sports to play besides base- ball, including soccer, basketball, football, and hockey.
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