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Abstract

The game of baseball has rarely changed since its beginnings, and its resultant ascent to the United States national pastime has done little to change the fundamentals of the sport. However, there have been significant shifts in the demographics of Major League Baseball. Latino players have seen their numbers jump up to 26.9% (2012) from single digits in the 1960s, while African-American players peaked at 18.5% two decades after desegregation, but has since fallen to the current (2012) level of 7.2%. The goal of this research project is to determine the cause for the rise in the numbers of foreign-born Latino baseball players appearing in the United States’ top baseball league. Previous historiography on the subject has suggested that U.S. neocolonial patterns led to baseball’s wild spread across parts of Latin America; consequently, these patterns contribute to the significant influx of foreign-born Latinos debuting in Major League Baseball. What has not been examined extensively is the effect economic factors have on the rise and fall of the number of players moving to Major League Baseball. Data was compiled to produce a database through SPSS (IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) that tested this possibility; consequently, it was determined that economic health does not have a significant effect on the number of debuts of foreign-born players in Major League Baseball. While economic factors cannot be ruled out, it is not a significant enough standalone variable to explain the migration of foreign-born Latino baseball players to the United States.

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