Reading the pitch : historical racialized narratives in U.S. mass media coverage of international baseball

Baseball, informally termed “America’s Game,” has become the world’s game. Through the advent of globalization baseball has spread internationally, reproduced throughout the globe while becoming individualized into the cultural context of each country where it is played. In the United States, the changing landscape of baseball participation has meant both rising international competition and an influx of international players to all levels of baseball in the U.S., from little league through the professional level in Major League Baseball (MLB). Much of the cultural impact of these changes has been represented through media, where newspaper, magazine, television, and online coverage all create, transmit, and reproduce narratives about baseball: who is participating, why and how they play, and what that means in the broader socio-cultural context of the United States. In this work, I examine the racialized narratives in baseball coverage of international players and community members in U.S. media from three distinct contexts by using a thematic analysis. First, I examine the media narratives surrounding Cuban players in MLB from 1991-2010 in five nationally published sports magazines, and demonstrate that these narratives often correlate with historically racialized narratives applied to Cuban migrants to the United States broadly, and not just within the sporting context. In the second piece, I study the media narratives surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s arrival to MLB from Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the Japanese professional league, and find historical narratives to be generally reproduced, albeit heavily dependent on the context of the political relationship between the U.S. and Japan. In the third study, I analyze the media coverage of the establishment of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and the eviction and uprooting of the Mexican and Mexican-American communities in Chavez Ravine and the racialized narratives produced and reproduced therein in coverage of the Los Angeles Times, as well as the influence the paper itself and local politics have on these narratives. Through three separate contexts (the experiences of a common nationality, an individual player, and a community and neighborhood) and time frames (the 1990s and early 2000s, 2017-2018, and the late 1940s onwards), the results of these three studies demonstrate the recurring presence of racialized narratives in the media coverage of international baseball, the political and economic influence on those narratives, and highlight the ways in which sports media coverage does not just “stick to sports,” but also communicates ideas about cultural identity, citizenship, and national belonging.