Mad Props, Cincy!

mightyflynn:

A ballpark just might be the most appropriate place in America to demand immigrant rights:
… By the 1870s baseball began to reflect the national culture in yet another way. The game started to absorb the first group of outsiders who would change baseball socially and culturally. The large influx of Irish and Germans fleeing Europe’s economic and political troubles in the 1840s quickly adopted baseball as a way of gaining acceptance in their adopted homeland. By the early 1880s, 62 percent of the players in the National League were of Irish or German descent.
… For the first, but not the last time, outside groups used baseball to proclaim their American identity. This process would continue through the modern history of baseball. In the first decades of the 20th century the children of various ethnic groups—Poles, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Czechs—used baseball to demonstrate their status as 100 percent American and to overcome anti-immigrant prejudice.
… After the integration of baseball, Latin Americans began to enter the game in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, producing such Hall of Famers as Juan Marichal, Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda and Tony Perez. Today, Latin America is one of the largest single sources of talent for professional baseball. The most common names of baseball players in the majors now are no longer Williams, Jones, and Smith, but Rodriquez and Martinez. In recent years Asia has joined Latin American as an important source of baseball talent. No fewer than 21 Asian players were on major league rosters at the beginning of the 2006 season.
- From “Food for Thought: Baseball and American History,” by John P. Rossi (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
(AP Photo/Al Behrman FanFeedr)

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