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July 6, 2005

Lies, Damned Lies

Forecasting the Future: Internationalization

by Nate Silver

My Forecasting the Future column from two weeks ago drew more e-mail replies than anything I’ve written here in the past eighteen months. I appreciate all of that, and I’ll take that as sufficient evidence that you guys enjoy these sort of non-traditional articles. Let’s continue on with the next installment in the series.

Trend: Major League Baseball is becoming more internationalized.

Is it likely to continue? Almost certainly.

As you’ll know if you’ve read my column for some time, one of the things I’m fond of is pointing out trends that are so obvious that nobody seems to have noticed. One of these trends is the rapidly increasing number of Latin American players in the game. Just fifteen years ago, in 1990, players born in Latin America or the Caribbean were responsible for 12.0 percent of major league playing time--a simple average of at bats and innings pitched. (These figures, by the way, do not account for the substantial number of native-born Latinos; I’m not going to try and play guessing games based on surnames. They do, however, include players from Puerto Rico.) Last year? The figure had increased to 24.4 percent, or more than twice as many. It’s not like these guys are scrubs, either; more than a third of the rosters for next week’s All-Star Game are composed of foreign-born Latinos.

Maybe some of you were aware of this. I certainly wasn’t. I assumed that there had been a steady or perhaps slightly rising percentage of Latin American players ever since the game became fully integrated in the late 50s. Obviously Latin Americans play a very prominent role in today’s game. But I had no idea that they played so much more prominent a role than they did only a handful of years ago.

It might be helpful to visualize this sort of thing: