Continuing the series of posts about baseball across the globe, I’d like to point to this article in yesterday’s NY Times, America’s Pastime Is Only a Blip in Soccer-Crazed Brazil.
Baseball and Brazil? That combination is evoked about as often as the Yankees and the samba.
But, yes, Brazil does have a national amateur team, and at its training center here, the squad has been preparing for months for the Pan American Games, which open July 13 in Rio de Janeiro. The team’s hope is that a strong performance in the competition, a sort of Olympics of the Americas, can help put baseball on the map in a country where the most popular sports are soccer, soccer and more soccer.
Interestingly, what baseball presence there is in the country didn’t come directly from the US:
Brazil has the largest population of Japanese descent of any country outside Japan, about two million people, and baseball has traditionally been played primarily, if not exclusively, in the three states where the bulk of the Japanese community has settled.
As a result, 16 of the 20 players on the team that will compete in Rio de Janeiro are of Japanese ancestry. But even those with no Japanese blood have learned the game with the names used in Japanese for positions and plays, and whenever Manager Mitsuyoshi Sato talks to the team, his players address him as sensei and bow respectfully when he finishes his remarks.
So, something of a double international bent to the story, which makes it even more remarkable…triple if you count the Cuban coaches they’ve been hiring.
Searching baseball-reference.com, there haven’t been any big leaguers born in Brazil. The Times article confirms this, mentioning about 30 are playing in Japan and Taiwan, although a few Brazilians have been signed by US teams.
By the way, one of the links on the Trolley Dodger International Baseball Links page is to the Confederação Brasileira de Beisebol e Softbol. You’ll need to read Portuguese, naturally.
Poking around for more info for this post, I came across a blog called, appropriately, Global Baseball, subtitled “One man’s year-long journey through the world of baseball”. Here’s his description:
I’m currently working on a year-long research project on the globalization of baseball, courtesy of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Over the next 12 months, my project will take me to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Australia, Puerto Rico, Okinawa, and Venezuela, and I decided to set up this blog to share some of the things I pick up along the way.
A new entry for the blogroll. :)