The Boston Red Sox' Opening Day roster featured five players from the Dominican Republic -- Julio Lugo, David Ortiz, Wily Mo Pena, Manny Ramirez, Julian Tavarez -- along with Japanese pitchers Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima. By comparison, the 1982 Sox had three foreign-born players, the 1957 team just one, and the 1907 Sox none at all. The roster illustrates three trends evident throughout the league.
- More foreign talent: 192 of the 750 players on this year's Opening Day rosters, or 25.6 percent, were from abroad. This makes MLB about twice as "internationalized" as the overall American workforce and a bit more global than American computer science and math, but still less international than farm and construction work. MLB reported yesterday that the minor league rosters are still more international -- 3,098 out of 6,701 players, or 46 percent, are from abroad -- though this figure seems to include Puerto Rico as well as actual foreign territories.
- Geography: Baseball scouts recruit mainly from the Caribbean basin and East Asia. Archrival Yankees counter the Sox' five Dominicans and two Japanese players with three Dominicans, two Japanese, two Venezuelans, Panamanian relief ace Mariano Rivera and temporarily disabled Taiwanese starting pitcher Chien-ming Wang. Pro hockey looks to northern and eastern Europe; pro basketball and 10-year-old Major League Soccer draw from a worldwide pool.
- Dominican Republic: as the Red Sox and Yankee rosters show, the Dominican Republic makes a startlingly big contribution to baseball. With a population of 9.2 million, the DR is home to 79 of this year's Opening Day players, or almost one in every nine. Venezuela's 48 players are the second-largest foreign contingent, followed by Canada's 16, Japan's 13, Mexico's 11; six Panamanians and six Cubans. Tampa Bay's Korean pitching duo Jae Kuk Ryu and Jae So, Colombian shortstops Edgar Renteria and Orlando Cabrera, and Nicaraguan pitcher Vicente Padilla make up the final five.
Baseball is not unique -- all North American pro leagues but the NFL now draw on worldwide talent pools. Thirty-six of the 170 players on Washington's five pro teams -- the NFL's Redskins, MLB's Nationals, NBA's Wizards, WNBA's Mystics, Major League Soccer's DC United -- come from abroad. The Redskins have no foreign players, though defensive tackle Joe Salavea ably represents American Samoa; the Wizards feature Lithuanian Darius Songaila and Mali's Miriam Sy plays guard for the WNBA's Mystics; the hockey Capitals play 14 Canadians, two Russians, two Czechs and one Slovak; and this year's Nationals have two Dominicans, a Canadian and a Venezuelan.
MLB, 2007 -- Baseball's official count of major and minor leaguers "born outside the United States," with Puerto Rico puzzlingly included in the foreign count:
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/press_releases/
press_release.jsp?ymd=20070403&content_id=1877328
&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb
The global media -- And across the Pacific, Japanese network NHK will broadcast 290 major league games this year, easily comparable to the totals for official U.S. carriers Fox, and ESPN combined. Twelve teams have Spanish-language websites, and MLB's official site comes in Spanish, Korean, and Japanese as well as English:
English -- http://mlb.mlb.com/index.jsp;
Spanish -- http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/spanish/mlb_spanish.jsp;
Korean -- http://www.major2.co.kr/;
Japanese -- http://mlb.yahoo.co.jp/.
National passion -- A look at Dominican baseball:
http://www.dominican-baseball.com/
player_development/index.php
And Santo Domingo's El Nacional interviews Washington Nationals manager Manny Acta, the first Dominican-born major league manager:
http://www.elnacional.com.do/article.aspx?id=14057
Across the Pacific -- Track Daisuke's gyro-ball, Hideki's sore wrist, Ichiro's push for the batting title, and the rest of your favorite Japanese stars:
http://japaneseballplayers.com/en/
And a look around the other leagues --
Basketball: 83 of the NBA's 418 players on 2006-2007 rosters from abroad. Though the NBA's foreign/local ratio is lower than baseball's, NBA scouts recruit from more countries: The 83 players come from 38 countries, from big ones like Russia and China to Uruguay, Georgia, Bosnia, Haiti, and the Central African Republic. The largest contingents are eight from Serbia; seven from France, six from Slovenia, and five each from Argentina, Brazil, and Lithuania. Meanwhile, 25 of the WNBA's 173 professional women players were from abroad. The 14.4 percent figure is slightly above the overall 12.6 percent rate for women's employment in the United States. The NBA's international players:
http://www.nba.com/players/int_players_0607.html
Hockey: "Nation" in the "National Hockey League" refers to Canada, not the United States, as the five founding teams in 1917 were all-Canadian: two Montreal teams, Quebec, Toronto, and Ottawa. These days, 24 of the 30 NHL teams are in the United States, but a bit more than half the NHL's current players are still Canadian. Another sixth come from the U.S.; the remaining third are almost all from northern Europe. Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, and Sweden supply most of the foreign players; smaller contingents come from Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, France, and Switzerland; four stragglers come from Central Asia, South Africa, Korea, and Brazil. The actual Montreal Canadiens put only 10 Canadians on the ice at Bell Centre, joined by three Russians and three Americans, two Czechs, two Finns, two Swiss, and one each from France, Kazakstan, Slovakia, and Belarus. The Canadiens' roster:
http://www.canadiens.com/eng/team/
redirect.cfm?sectionID=habsRoster.cfm
Football: Least "globalized" among the leagues, only 12 of the NFL's 1,695 players on last year's kickoff day were foreign-born. (Nine from Canada, two from Australia, one from Panama.) The NFL hopes to start by building an international audience:
http://www.nfl.com/international
Soccer: Major League Soccer has 329 players, of whom 73 are from 37 foreign countries. Canada has the largest contingent, followed by Brazil, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Also represented -- Ghana, Morocco, Bolivia, Honduras, Costa Rica, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, MLS announces a big foreign catch:
http://www.mlsnet.com/news/mls_news.jsp?
ymd=20070116&content_id=81948
&vkey=news_mls&fext=.jsp
