At a recent Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, thirty Japanese tourists sat together near the field along the third base line. They were in Los Angeles not to see a movie star or go to Disneyland, but to cheer on Japan’s most famous athlete—Dodgers slugger and likely National League Most Valuable Player (MVP) Shohei Ohtani.
“We traveled here to see the best baseball player in the world,” said Takeshi Tago, who journeyed from a Tokyo suburb with his wife to watch the Dodgers’s three final home games against the San Diego Padres.
Ohtani is a remarkable baseball player. This season he hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases, a feat no other player has accomplished. In one late season game he had six hits, three home runs, two stolen bases, and ten runs batted in.
Ohtani grew up in Mizusawa, a city in northern Japan, and played in the top Japanese professional baseball league for five years before joining the Los Angeles Angels in 2018. He joined the Dodgers this season. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was also born in Japan, as was pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Ohtani’s decision to play in the United States is part of a broader long-term trend: a dramatic rise in foreign-born players in the major leagues.
In 1950, only 3.6 percent of the 530 major league players were foreign-born, according to Baseball Almanac. By 1990, more than 10 percent of the 1,029 major leaguers were foreign-born, a majority of them from the Dominican Republic. This year about one-quarter of the 1,454 major league players were born outside of the United States, including 142 in the Dominican Republic, ninety-one in Venezuela, thirty-three in Cuba, seventeen in Canada, sixteen in Mexico, and eleven in Japan. (Unlike Baseball Almanac, we don’t consider the twenty-seven players from Puerto Rico to be “foreign-born.”)
Immigrants have helped revitalize the game of baseball. Fans seem to agree, as rising attendance at major league games and team revenues can attest.
A large part of this boom in foreign players owes to Major League Baseball’s investment in the training and recruitment of players abroad. Every major league team currently runs baseball academies in the Dominican Republic. The Dodgers opened theirs in 1987 and recently started a similar facility in Uganda, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
Major League Baseball has also benefited from changes in immigration law. According to Marissa Kiss, a research fellow at the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University, changes brought into effect by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) made it easier for teams to bring minor league players to the United States.
“Major League players who are outstanding in their profession apply for a P-1 visa, while rookie and minor league players apply for an H-2B visa,” Kiss tells The Progressive. “The IRCA split the H-2 visa program in two, allowing for a non-agricultural program that allowed teams an easier pathway to recruit and sign foreign players to minor league contracts.”
Starting in the late 1800s, the U.S. government and baseball team owners, with the help of sporting goods manufacturers, began exporting baseball to other countries. As described in Robert Elias’s 2010 book The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad, this practice was a form of both cultural diplomacy and business expansion.
Through the early 1900s, many German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, British, and other immigrants filled big league rosters—a marker of becoming an American not only for the players but for the ethnic groups they belonged to. During the 1890 season, for example, forty-three out of 510 major league players were born abroad, including twelve from Ireland.
Baseball is now popular in Japan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, Canada, and even Australia. Many of the best players from these countries have played in the U.S. major leagues. Many more hope to in the future.
The history of “America’s pastime,” a term coined in the nineteenth century to describe baseball’s popularity, has, like the history of our country, been strengthened and enlivened by immigrants. Our research shows that, since 2000, about one-quarter of the 144 winners of the Cy Young (best pitcher in each league), MVP (also one from each league), and the Rookie of the Year (best first-year player in each league) awards were born outside the United States.
Last year, the National League MVP was Venezuelan-born Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., while Ohtani—then with the Angels—was the American League MVP.
Americans cheer for immigrant baseball players and admire their talent. Immigrant players also bring new fans to ballparks, as the Dodgers discovered when Mexico-born Fernando Valenzuela joined the team in 1980, triggering “Fernandomania” and attracting more Mexican American fans to Dodger Stadium. Today, Latinx fans often constitute more than 40 percent of the crowd at Dodger home games.
Throughout U.S. history, immigrants have strengthened our economy and diversified our culture; but anti-immigrant sentiments and laws have also been a part of that history. Today, many politicians gain voter support by demonizing immigrants and demanding that those without documents be deported. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says immigrants from what he calls “shithole countries” are “poisoning” America. He and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have falsely claimed immigrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, committing more violent crimes than native-born citizens, and taking jobs from Americans.
The issue has become deeply polarizing. Fifty-five percent of Americans think we should decrease the number of immigrants living here, according to a recent Gallup poll. The same poll found that 47 percent agree that we should be “deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.” At the same time, 70 percent of Americans favor or strongly favor “allowing immigrants living in the United States illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.”
Following in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps, many players like Roberto Clemente, Jim Bouton, Mudcat Grant, Curt Flood, Bill White, and Hank Aaron have spoken out against racism in baseball and in society.
Soon after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, major leaguers Sean Doolittle, Dexter Fowler, Collin McHugh, Brandon McCarthy, and Bruce Maxwell criticized Trump's hostile rhetoric toward immigrants, Black Americans, and Muslims.
In May 2019, several foreign-born members of the Boston Red Sox, including Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Eduardo Rodríguez, Sandy León, Eduardo Núñez, and Héctor Velázquez, as well as their U.S.-born Black teammates Mookie Betts, David Price, and Jackie Bradley, and Puerto Rico-born manager Alex Cora, refused to attend a White House ceremony with Trump to celebrate the team’s World Series victory. Cora said at the time that he did not “feel comfortable” celebrating at the White House in light of Trump’s widely-criticized response to the devastation in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria, which, in 2017, left nearly 3,000 people dead.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matters movement in 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many professional athletes, as well as Giants manager Gabe Kapler, spoke out, wore BLM shirts, and kneeled in protest.
After police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot and seriously injured Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old unarmed black man, in August 2020, Milwaukee Brewers’ outfielder Christian Yelich told the Wisconsin State Journal that “We had a team meeting shortly after and came to the decision” to cancel their game against the Cincinnati Reds.”
“We’ve been wearing these shirts throughout the year, but there comes a time where you have to live it, you have to step up,” Yelich said. ““It was a unanimous vote. Everyone was in favor of not playing, and sending a message and making a statement.”
After Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts, the team’s only Black player at the time, told his teammates that he was going to sit out a game against the San Francisco Giants, the other twenty-seven men in the clubhouse (including six Latino players) decided to join him in the protest. The Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres did the same. Some players—including the Cubs’s Jason Heyward, the Cardinals’s Dexter Fowler and Jack Flaherty, and the Rockies’s Matt Kemp—refused to play even though their teams took the field. In total, players forced the cancellation of seven games.
But few ballplayers, including those born outside the United States, have publicly backed the idea that immigrants contribute to making America a better country, or spoke out against the escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric by Trump and other Republicans.
Why is this?
It can’t be that they are afraid of being deported. Who is going to deny Ohtani or Acuña a visa for speaking out? Perhaps because they aren’t American citizens, they don’t think they have the right or the responsibility to speak about American politics.
Or maybe they don’t speak out because they want to protect their “brand”—that is, their ability to get lucrative commercial endorsement deals. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” NBA star Michael Jordan said in 1990, when he was criticized for not endorsing Democrat Harvey Gantt in his campaign to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Jesse Helms in their race for the U.S. Senate seat from North Carolina. Jordan changed course in 2017, after Trump criticized football star Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who took a knee prior to a game to oppose racism. Jordan issued a rare statement to The Charlotte Observer, saying: “Those who exercise the right to peacefully express themselves should not be demonized or ostracized.”
In 2010, the Major League Baseball Players Association, the union representing major league players, and a few foreign-born ballplayers spoke out against Arizona’s anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070, which would have required law enforcement personnel to determine the immigration status of people they encountered and arrest them without a warrant if they believed they were in Arizona illegally.
Yorvit Torrealba, a Venezuelan-born catcher then playing for the San Diego Padres, said, “This is racist stuff.” Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, also from Venezuela, threatened to boycott the 2011 All-Star Game which took place in Phoenix, Arizona. “I want to see this country [go for] two days without [immigrants] to see how good we’re doing,” Guillen said at the time.
We could use more of that today—foreign players and their U.S.-born teammates raising their voices against the malicious attacks on immigrants that are designed to fuel hatred and to help re-elect Donald Trump.
The World Series begins on October 25 and will conclude just days before the November 5 election. All four remaining playoff teams have had immigrant players on their rosters this season—eight on the Dodgers, thirteen on the Guardians, fourteen on the Yankees, and fifteen on the Mets.
We encourage all foreign-born players, not just those playing for World Series teams, to make a joint statement before the election expressing these sentiments:
“We are immigrants here. We are grateful for the opportunity to play baseball in the United States and we appreciate the fan support we have received. But we are concerned that immigrants like us are being attacked for political gain. We will not be silent about it. And we don’t believe you should be silent either. Let’s play ball.”