Where Are Baseball Players Born?

How do Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, and U.S. differ at developing MLB baseball players?

Elly de la Cruz of Dominican Republic, Paul Skenes of Lake Forest, CA, and Pete Crow-Armtrong of Sherman Oaks, CA

Baseball is not a truly global team sport like soccer or basketball, but it still ranks up there with, say, cricket. It’s mainly played in three parts of the world: North America (U.S. and Canada), the northern half of Latin America down through Venezuela and Colombia, and northeast Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).

Apparently, American baseball spread outward around the Caribbean from Cuba, the culturally dominant Spanish colony. Baseball is tied into Cuban nationalism (e.g., it’s widely believed that Fidel Castro almost made the major leagues as a pitcher, although in truth he was a better high school basketball player), so there are multiple narratives.

One, popular in the U.S., is that baseball became hugely popular after it was introduced by American soldiers who defeated Cuba’s Spanish colonial overlords in 1898. Another, popular in Cuba, is that it was already a massively popular game because it had been adopted by the Cuban independence movement from the 1860s onward as a rebuke to the bullfighting of Cuba’s colonial master, Spain.

I’m sympathetic to the latter story, but the details seems a little off because most early Cuban cultural contacts with the U.S. were through the Gulf Coast, where baseball was not terribly popular until the late 19th Century. For example, the first great baseball player from the Deep South was Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, who reached the major leagues in 1905.

Before the Civil War, baseball had been a northern sport, played with various rules in New York, Massachusetts, and other northern locales. During the Civil War, Union soldiers had a lot of time on their hands to play each other on the baseball diamond (or baseball square in the Massachusetts Game), but they needed to agree on the rules. Eventually, the New York Game, the best organized of the variants, won the loyalty of Northern soldiers and became the National Pastime when the North won the war.

But that meant baseball was not very popular in the South for a generation or so after the war.

Also, was bullfighting ever really truly supposed to be a sport for the Cuban masses? Bullfighting is amazing, but it’s more of an art form than a sport. Thus, bullfighting correspondents are less like sportswriters than art critics. As a sport for the masses, it sounds kind of like grand opera would be.

“Well, Little Jose, you have today off from school. What are you going to do?”

“Me, Pedro, Juan, Diego, and the rest of the kids are going to get together and put on The Barber of Seville!”

“Have fun!”

So, I dunno what the precise story is with the origins of Latin American baseball.

But Cuba’s role is undeniably important in the spread of Latin baseball.

Baseball Reference tabulates major league players by country of birth. So I’ve ranked country of birth in order by today’s usual all-around metric of Wins Above Replacement *

Paywall Here. After it, I’ll explain what I see from this table.