Major league baseball and the exploitation of Latin American children: Confronting baseball's greatest sin

Abstract

On April 1, 2021, Major League Baseball celebrated its 145th Opening Day. Across the 30 clubs, 256 players represented 20 different countries and territories outside of the United States. The 256 players accounted for 28.3% of total players on Opening Day rosters and inactive lists. This number of foreign‐born players marked the second highest all‐time total on Opening Day rosters for a full season. Like never before, baseball has become global. Fans are routinely enthralled by the passion and flare these players bring to the game, but few are aware of the childhood exploitation they must overcome along the way.

‘Did the NFL start caring about women a lot more after Ray Rice? Probably not’: White-collar deviance and violence against women in racial capitalist sport

“…Some scholars have focused on organizational deviance in the sport context, though they have not examined how organizations respond to athlete violence. This research includes work examining Canadian hockey culture’s creation and maintenance of Canadian hockey masculinity (Allain, 2008), the English Football Association’s 55 year ban on women’s football (Williams, 2003), major league baseball teams’ exploitation of Latin American teenagers (Shimshi, 2022), and FIFA’s continued sportswashing in places like Qatar and Russia (Fruh et al, 2023). Research on organizational deviance in sport often demonstrates the gendered and racial and gendered inequities produced and reified in sport, as well as the privileging of a masculinity rooted in dominance, violence and control (Schwartz, 2021).…”

“…In terms of organizational violence in sport, more attention has been paid to labour, political and environmental violence and harm (Boykoff, 2022; Shimshi, 2022; Tóffano Pereira et al, 2019). From American colleges with largely white athletic departments reaping financial rewards from the unpaid labour of Black athletic workers (Van Rheenen, 2013), to political displacement of local populations and environmental destruction wrought by the International Olympic Committee in the lead up to their mega-events (Boykoff, 2022; Horne, 2012), critical sport scholars have outlined some of the ways that the actions of sport organizations and the profit imperatives of elite sports can produce harm and violence.…”