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Adrian Burgos Jr
University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2007
362pp., $21.95 Paperback
ISBN 2007002883
Adrian Burgos has just published a study on the history of Latin American and Latino players in Major League baseball that represents a significant contribution to the history of the sport, to the history of Latinos in the United States, to the history of the color line in North America, and to American history in general. Burgos provides a remarkable historical overview of the process of racialization of non-white athletes in professional baseball since the origins of the sport as a commercial enterprise in the United States. Beyond what the book's title promises - and delivers - as a narrative of the participation by players of Latin America origin/descent in the Big Leagues, this study provides a detailed history of the color line in the so-called American national pastime, from its birth as a capitalist enterprise to the present steroid-scandal era. As a de facto segregated institution between the 1880s and the 1940s, American...