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Dominican baseball academies
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media Contact: Dana Navarro
November 3, 2008 (773) 442-4227
d-navarro@neiu.edu
** Free and open to the public
The Borders of Free Agency: Dominican Athletes in the Baseball World, 1975 – 2006
WHAT: One of the most important developments in the recent history of professional baseball has been the emergence of the “baseball academy” system in the Dominican Republic. Daniel Gilbert, instructor, American studies, at Macalester College, will discuss the impact of baseball academies established by U.S. Major League teams in the Dominican Republic. Currently, 30 percent of U.S. Major League players are foreign born, and most of those come from the Dominican Republic. Twenty-eight of the 30 U.S. Major League teams operate academies on the island.
Gilbert considers the academy system’s impact on both the trajectory of Dominican professional baseball and the reconfiguration of the wider baseball world since the late 1970s. He argues that the academy system brought a fundamental shift to the place of Dominican identity in the baseball world, as Major League Baseball’s teams increasingly incorporated and mobilized forms of Dominicanness within their own talent development and marketing initiatives. Gilbert considers this development as a component of the labor history of baseball’s era of free agency, a history defined as much by new practices of enclosure as by new promises of mobility.
WHERE: Newberry Library
80 W. Walton in Chicago
WHEN: Friday, November 14 at 3:30 p.m.
DETAILS: Daniel Gilbert teaches in the American studies department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. He recently completed his doctoral work in American studies at Yale University with a dissertation titled Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency.
For further information regarding this or any seminar in the Newberry Library’s Chicago Seminar on Sport and Culture, contact Steve Riess at (773) 442-5631 or s-riess@neiu.edu.
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