Power Ball by Rob Neyer

Author:Rob Neyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Visitors Seventh

The ball is round but it comes in a square box.

—Latino baseball proverb

Having thrown only nine pitches in the sixth inning, Alcántara’s back on the mound for the seventh. His first pitch to George Springer is pure heat, 95 miles an hour through the middle of the strike zone, and Springer’s mighty swing meets nothing but air. Alcántara’s second pitch is supposed to be more of the same, except this time down. Down, and inside.

Well, Alcántara gets it inside. But it’s inside and up, so far off target that Springer’s struck flush on his left elbow by another mid-90s fastball.

Which might be catastrophic for him and his team. Except the missile caroms harmlessly off Springer’s elbow pad, which he nonchalantly flings aside before trotting to first base, none the worse for wear. Meanwhile, Alcántara had turned toward the outfield and rested his hands on his knees, a sort of remorseful cringe that anyone within a hundred yards could recognize.

The Astros’ next four hitters are Altuve, Correa, Reddick, and Gurriel. Which means Alcántara, a native of the Dominican Republic, will face, if he lasts long enough, a native of Venezuela, a native of Puerto Rico, a native of Georgia, and a native of Cuba. Jharel Cotton was born in the U.S. Virgin Islands. And later in the game, a native of Australia will pitch for the A’s. Internationally speaking, just about the only thing missing from this game is an Asian player.

Which we could have had! Earlier this season, Japanese native Norichiki Aoki was usually in the Astros’ lineup when a right-handed pitcher started for the other team. But while Aoki did what he might reasonably have been expected to do, what he did—hitting and fielding approximately as a league-average hitter and outfielder does—wasn’t something the star-studded Astros particularly needed. Especially with the emergence of both Jake Marisnick and (especially) Marwin Gonzalez as solid hitters. So at the July 31 trade deadline, Aoki and outfield prospect Teoscar Hernández were swapped to the Blue Jays for veteran lefty Francisco Liriano, who’d been starting for Toronto but went straight into the Astros’ bullpen.*

It’s easy to miss, because of the gradual nature of the transformation. But when you sit down and start looking at the numbers, you realize that the paramount accomplishment of ex-Commissioner Selig’s long tenure wasn’t adding a couple of franchises or growing revenues or shepherding MLB into the Internet Age or adding wild cards to the postseason format. No, Selig’s biggest success was largely achieving his avowed goal of globalizing the game.

In Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, twenty-eight players got into the box score. Exactly one of them—Indians shortstop Bobby Avila, from Mexico—was born outside the continental United States. One.

In Game 3, Puerto Rico native Rubén Gómez started on the mound for the Giants; he and Avila were the only two players in the entire World Series born outside the forty-eight U.S. states.

There were, in the 1950s, a smattering of major leaguers born in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.

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