Look what they've done to my game! (baseball)

• Author: Heuer, Robert

BASEBALL, AN EPIC DOCUMENTARY TELECAST LAST FALL ON THE U.S. PUBLIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM, TELLS THE STORY OF AN INSTITUTION THAT FOR GENERATIONS WAS SECOND ONLY TO THE FLAG AS A SYMBOL OF S. NATIONALISM. THE NINE-PART SERIES, PRODUCED BY FILMMAKER KEN BURNS, WAS ALSO DUBBED SPANISH. THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL-LATIN AMERICA MADE THE SOUNDTRACK, USING PROFESSIONAL ACTORS FROM MEXICO, AND TRANSMITTED EL BEISBOL OVER CABLE NETWORKS THROUGHOUT THE HEMISPHERE LAST FALL. LATIN AMERICA'S RICH CONTRIBUTION TO BASEBALL HISTORY, HOWEVER, WASN'T INCLUDED IN THE SCRIPT.

Series producer Lynn Novick researched baseball history for six years to make the documentary, calling that time a "wonderful voyage of discovery." However, the Latin American connection, Novick says, "is a separate story that would make a great film." In making Baseball, Burns and his crew followed the path of his highly acclaimed Civil War documentary, using the common ground of the national pastime as a focus to explore a century and a half of race relations. Yet while underscoring the integration saga as baseballs contribution to American society, they effectively segregated Latin Americans from the story.

About 140 Hispanic players appeared on major league rosters last year, and hundreds of aspirants were scattered throughout the minor league system. Thousands of teenagers toil away in a half-dozen Caribbean countries and Mexico. Major league scouts, called escuchas, scour the baseball empire's southern tier. Their job, as the title of Kevin Kerrane's 1984 book on the scouting world showed, is to put the "dollar sign on the muscle." And bona-fide Latin American stars -- bobby Bonilla, Ruben Sierra, Danny Tartabull, and Jose Canseco -- are among the major league's highest paid players.

Last August, however, the major league players' union went on strike with fifty games left in the season, and the World Series was canceled for the first time since 1904. The strike was finally halted in April; yet multimillionaire owners and millionaire players are still battling over a revenue pie that is richer than ever, thanks in no small measure to the billion-dollar contract of commercial television.

Last February, with the continuing strike threatening his livelihood, Julio Franco, a Dominican from a San Pedro de Macoris sugar plantation, accepted a two-year offer from Japan's Chiba Lotte Marines for US$7 million, nearly twice what he expected to make playing for the Chicago White Sox. "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse," the thirty-three-year-old Franco told Chicago sportswriters. "I don't have anything against the White Sox. I had a lot of fun last year. But how can you say no to this deal?"

Franco is one of seventeen major leaguers to go to Japan since the strike. Henry Cotto, a thirty-four-year-old New York-born Puerto Rican, played there last year for the Yomiuri Giants. Before the strike was called off, Cotto was hoping to earn a spot in the...