“Take me out to the partido de beisbol”

I’ve posted before on interesting snippets of trade data the Progressive Policy Institute publishes. This week’s PPI topic heralds the Opening Day of the baseball season and celebrates the huge number of foreign-born baseball players on major league teams.

According to PPI, 192 of the 750 players on this year’s Opening Day rosters, or 25.6 percent, were born in other countries. Not surprisingly to baseball fans, the Dominican Republic leads in the number of foreign-born Major League players. Seventy-nine players — or almost one in nine — are from the DR.

Baseball is a passion in the DR — nearly 800,000 children take part in organized baseball there — almost 10 percent of its total population of 9.2 million. Take a look at this website devoted to DR baseball.

With all the negative talk about globalization today, it’s kinda nice that this very American game is attracting players from all over the world. Quick — name the MLPs from Curacao and Aruba.