Last November, MLB made headlines for donating $5,000 to Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith through the league’s political action committee set up by the commissioner’s office. Hyde-Smith had made remarks about attending a public hanging while she spoke at a campaign event early that month, and after public pressure, the league requested the donation be returned. The news left the cycle rather quickly, as MLB pivoted to the offseason and a labor-management tussle that continues to inch toward an explosive conclusion in 2022.
Of lesser note in the baseball and political press were MLB’s other campaign donations, which the league and most individual team owners make every two years to candidates of both major political parties. MLB lobbies Congress heavily to promote its own interests—most recently in an effort to suppress minor league wages—and they take a blanket approach to contributions in order to influence as many sitting and prospective members of Congress as possible. The aforementioned goals have support on either side of the aisle in Washington, and the league works hard to keep it that way.
There’s one political issue on which MLB and Congress act in concert that receives significantly less press, though, and it’s impacting the way that professional baseball operates at every level across the Americas: the United States’ intervention in Venezuela.
Baseball has a rich history in Venezuela, and Organized Baseball (MLB and its affiliated minor leagues) has a similarly long history of involvement in the country. Hundreds of Venezuelans have played in the major leagues, with Venezuelan minor leaguers throughout the years numbering over 4,000. A significant portion of current major league rosters are composed of Venezuelan players, too, as 68 of the 882 players on 2019’s Opening Day rosters or inactive lists hailed from Venezuela. For many years, Venezuela has produced the third-most major leaguers of any country, behind only the US and the Dominican Republic.
But, as the late historian Peter Bjarkman puts it, “The plight of the Latin ballplayer in the professional leagues operating on North American soil has been a particularly tragic affair from the outset.”[1] There is also much joy amidst the tragedy, but the league’s exploitation and subjugation of Latin American players—and particularly Venezuelan players—continues apace in 2019. Caps on international free agent spending, the closing of Venezuelan baseball academies, and the contract extensions signed by Ronald Acuña and German Márquez are just the latest examples of Major League Baseball’s systematic suppression of Venezuelan players’ salaries and increasing control over the fates of those players.
In Venezuela, a political and humanitarian crisis continues. Nicolás Maduro’s 2018 presidential election victory remains contentious both in Venezuela and abroad, as the US and 53 other countries recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president. The US has also imposed sanctions on Venezuela, and its allies have followed suit. The December 2018 murders of Luis Valbuena and José Castillo have heightened the focus that the baseball world has on the country’s situation.[2] Commissioner Rob Manfred recently warned players not to travel to Venezuela due to safety concerns amidst the current crisis within the country, and the Caribbean Professional Baseball Leagues Confederation moved the Caribbean Series to another country for the second consecutive year. These events provide the backdrop against which the future of Venezuelan baseball and Venezuelan players in Organized Baseball will be decided.
Venezuelan baseball’s relationship to American baseball and Caribbean baseball is at an inflection point. There are historical precedents for many of these problems, and the decisions being made by Manfred and the US government are the continuation of a long history of US intervention in the country. These developments also distinguish the league’s exploitation of Venezuelan players from its exploitation of Dominican players. As we’ll see, MLB is not merely a bystander in the United States’ ongoing political and economic project in Venezuela; they are an active participant in it.
***
From Revolutionary Beginnings to Imperial Orbit: 1895-1959
Baseball arrived on the northern shores of South America in the mid-1890s, introduced in Caracas by Cuban expatriates. That baseball traveled from the US to Cuba to Venezuela is no accident: relations between the three nations tightened and became increasingly complex in the late-19th century. As Cuba fought for independence from Spain, the US worked to bring the island nation into its expanding political sphere, culminating in the Spanish-American War (1898). Wealthier Cubans had already begun to send their children to the US for education during Cuba’s Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), and baseball was one of the aspects of American culture that Cubans brought back to the isle; quickly, Cubans developed their own baseball style and community. Spurning Spanish culture for American culture as an act of defiance became a marker of national identity, and Cubans were just as eager to export the game to other Latin American countries.[3]
Thus began baseball’s emergence in Venezuela. In 1895, a Cuban émigré named Emilio Cramer started a small, five-team league in Caracas in conjunction with a cigar factory, primarily to raise money for ongoing independence efforts in his home country. Highlighting Venezuelan baseball’s ties to revolutionary, pan-Latin American politics, Cramer named his club Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, honoring the revolutionary who freed the slaves on his plantation, declared Cuban independence, and ignited the Ten Years’ War.[4]
In the first few decades of the 20th century, players across the Americas began to travel not only between Cuba and the US, but between the burgeoning baseball nations of Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. The first international competitions between Latin American teams began in the 1920s, quickly becoming a staple of the region’s larger sporting culture. Venezuela would enter its first amateur international competition in 1940, coming to the national stage more slowly than many of its Caribbean neighbors. Their greenhorn status wouldn’t last long, though: the following year, Venezuela stunned Cuba to win an international championship. The country also won amateur championships in 1944 and 1945.[5]
As the popularity of baseball grew in Venezuela, American corporations pushed southward into the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Latin Americans subjected to the increasing encroachment of American corporations found themselves exploited and underpaid in various industries. In Venezuela, American companies primarily concerned themselves with the booming oil industry. Between 1920 and 1935, oil grew from under two percent of Venezuela’s exports to over 90 percent.[6] Around the same time, three foreign companies (Standard Oil among them) controlled almost the entire Venezuelan oil industry.[7] Oil had become the most important industry in the world, and it transformed life in Venezuela dramatically. As Eduardo Galeano writes, “Nothing compares with this ‘black gold’ as a magnet for foreign capital, nothing earns such lush profits, no jewel in the diadem of capitalism is so monopolized, and no businessmen wield the global political power of the great petroleum corporations.”[8] American capital flowed into Venezuela, along with American consumerism and culture; soon, American baseball interests would follow.
Workers in a Venezuelan oil field, 1930s. Image courtesy Standard Oil (New Jersey) Collection Photographic Archives, University of Louisville.
In the Venezuelan company towns run by the oil corporations,[9] baseball was popular among the workers; a robust national baseball culture was growing. The 1934-1935 Concordia team, a Venezuelan club boasting international stars including Josh Gibson, Luis Aparicio Sr., Luis Tiant Sr., and Martín Dihígo, played a series of celebrated games against the storied Escogido club in the Dominican Republic. Concordia’s director was the son of Venezuela’s dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, perhaps best known for attracting American and European oil companies to Venezuela, helping to usher in the age of American imperialism in the country. National interest in baseball took hold at the elite level, too.
With success coming for the Venezuelan national team, the Concordia team, and other barnstorming clubs, Venezuela was ready for a professional league of its own. The Liga Venezolana de Béisbol Profesional formed in 1946, hot off the heels of the national team’s string of amateur championships.
In addition to developing a national professional circuit and showing well on the international stage, Venezuelan players traveled abroad to play professionally. Many made stops in Cuba, which featured integrated rosters, and the US, which remained racially segregated. Due to that segregation, most Latin American players in the US were confined to the Negro Leagues early on, where salaries were worse than than in Caribbean leagues, resulting in only one player in Negro Leagues history claiming Venezuela as his native country.[10]
Following a brief professional debut in the inaugural season of the Venezuelan league, Santa Lucía, Venezuela native Carlos Ascanio traveled to Cuba in 1946, where he became friendly with a Cuban pitcher who played for the Negro Leagues’ New York Black Yankees. Characteristic of the type of international exchange between leagues during that period, Ascanio traveled north with his friend and played in a handful of games for the Black Yankees that season. But with Jackie Robinson’s major league debut the following year, Venezuelan players would find little incentive to play Negro League baseball following Ascanio’s cup of coffee.
More typical than Ascanio’s story is that of Pelayo Chacón, a Cuban who played brilliant shortstop for, and later managed, different iterations of the New York Cubans/Cuban Stars.[11] The dark-skinned Chacón attracted attention from major league scouts while with the Cubans, but he ultimately played his entire US professional career in the Negro Leagues before moving permanently to Venezuela in 1931 and becoming a coach. Historian Adrian Burgos describes Chacón’s experiences as typical for a Latin American player in the United States, writing that Chacón’s decision to move to Venezuela “fits a larger pattern of migration among Latino laborers who moved within the Spanish-speaking Americas or to the United States due to their lower position within the Americas’ segmented labor structure.”[12] Both Ascanio and Chacón’s stories illuminate the opportunities available to Latin American players and the opportunity denied to them at the highest level of Organized Baseball. These players moved often because of a quickly evolving international baseball system that reified the political and economic power structures developing in the region.
Despite the dearth of Venezuelans in the American professional leagues in the 1930s and 1940s, Organized Baseball and the Negro Leagues had strong connections to the South American country. In the two decades prior to Robinson’s 1947 debut, some involved in Organized Baseball began re-negotiating the color line in search of cheaper player pools to exploit. Drawing upon his firsthand experience as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1911—when the Reds signed the major leagues’ first two Cuban players, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans—Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith began to scout the Caribbean in the 1930s. Griffith sought to fill out his perennially second-division team with cheap players he extracted from Latin America, and before the 1935 season, Griffith hired scout Joe Cambria to rove the Caribbean. Griffith agreed to pay Cambria a commission for any player he signed who made the Senators or a minor-league affiliate.[13]
Cambria primarily operated in Cuba, which at that time was still the biggest hotbed of baseball talent in the Caribbean, but the Senators signed players from other countries, too. In 1939, the Cambria-signed Alejandro Carrasquel debuted for the Senators as the first Venezuelan major leaguer; Venezuela followed only Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico in Latin American countries sending players to the majors. Carrasquel pitched reasonably well for seven seasons in Washington, but his darker complexion and nationality challenged the notion of a stark black-white color barrier in the majors. Some American sportswriters critiqued Griffith’s exploitation of Latin American players and used the players as examples of the league’s arbitrary exclusion of black American players. Shirley Povich of the Washington Post zeroed in on Carrasquel as an example of the numerous “black Senators.”[14] Sam Lacy, the Washington area’s most prominent black baseball writer, focused on Griffith and Cambria’s bald-faced ignorance of better, darker-skinned Latin American players while pushing hard for black American integration.[15] Organized Baseball’s limited incursion into Venezuela was clearly not separated from its exclusion of black American players; rather, the signing of Carrasquel is evidence of Griffith and others’ commitment to the color line and desire for greater pools of cheap players they could exploit.
Alex Carrasquel (center) with Roberto Estalella (left) and Elmer Gedeon, 1939. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.
Griffith himself insisted on these players’ whiteness, but many fellow Senators and opponents saw Carrasquel and other darker-skinned Latinos as black and treated them as such. The Venezuelan hurler wasn’t the first Latin American player to push the boundaries of the color line—Almeida and Marsans faced challenges from other players, executives, and the press all the way back in 1911; contemporary Senators like Roberto Estalella joined Carrasquel on the receiving end of racism in the ‘30s and ‘40s—but Carrasquel is emblematic of the financial incentive that Venezuelan players provided Griffith and the discourse that surrounded these players’ presence in the white major leagues.[16]
As Cambria and Griffith signed Latin American players in droves, black American players shut out of Organized Baseball sojourned south to Venezuela to ply their craft in the winter, often for better wages and in less segregated spaces than they experienced in the United States. Black American players had spent winters in the Cuban leagues for decades already, but the developing circuit in Venezuela offered another venue for these players to make a living playing baseball. Jackie Robinson even played a winter in Venezuela immediately after signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in October 1945, exciting Venezuelan fans and making the possibility of a major league career more tangible for young Latin American players.[17]
New technological advancements opened more opportunities in the Caribbean and United States as well. In 1947, Venezuela’s state-owned airline began flights from Caracas to New York, with a stop in Havana in each direction, making travel between the three countries easier and strengthening economic and political ties.[18]
The flow of players between these countries was asymmetric, as racial segregation, corporate intrusion, and high-level international relations determined opportunities for players. To make matters worse for Latin American players, agreements between major league clubs and Latin American amateurs were often legally flimsy, demonstrating the imbalance of power and knowledge in these transactions. In the 1930s, Branch Rickey, the executive who signed Robinson for the Dodgers, instructed his scouts to “sign” American amateurs to farcical contracts that offered no money or security.[19] Players could then be signed in large volume and released with no repercussions.
Once brought on by Griffith to scout the Caribbean, Cambria took Rickey’s techniques and aggressively applied them to an even larger pool of players who had less power in negotiating contracts.[20] The practices employed by scouts and executives like Cambria and Rickey set many precedents—flouting age restrictions, skimping on bonuses (if offering them at all), hoarding scores of players under questionably legal pretenses—that conditioned the experiences of hopeful major leaguers. Many of those precedents still persist in MLB’s scouting and development in the region.[21]
A framework for American baseball involvement in Latin America was developing. Although relationships between these countries’ baseball spheres evolved somewhat slowly through most of the first half of the 20th century (US military intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic did affect them), they changed quickly in the years 1946 and 1947, as several important events occurred in succession, ultimately solidifying the relationships between the US and Latin America in ways that defined the next half-century.
The aforementioned formation of the Venezuelan league in 1946 did not come without its difficulties, as the international baseball stage was ablaze with a controversy that would alter the relationship between Organized Baseball and the various Caribbean leagues. After several years of growth due to more attractive salaries and a more egalitarian racial atmosphere, Jorge Pasquel’s independent Mexican League began to raid Negro League baseball for players. It threatened to do the same to the majors, marking the first significant challenge to Organized Baseball since the Federal League’s 1914-1915 push.[22] Major leaguers, too, used Pasquel’s promise of better salaries to negotiate higher pay with their American teams. Recognizing the existential threat that Pasquel’s league posed to the reserve clause and to the color line, and therefore the order that the league had established, Organized Baseball pushed back. Teams filed lawsuits against the Mexican League, and Commissioner Happy Chandler launched a series of public invectives against Pasquel. The US State Department even got involved, sensing the possibility of disturbed relations between not only the US and Mexico, but between the US and other baseball-playing Latin American countries.
Since the Venezuelan league began play the same year that the Mexican League challenged Organized Baseball and the same year that Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, ostensibly opening the door for darker-skinned Venezuelans, it was poised to succeed or fail on the resolution to the crisis. After Chandler blacklisted any player who had played in the Mexican League and any player who took part in a game with a blacklisted player, the exchange of ballplayers between the various leagues found itself in danger. The chilling effect of Chandler’s sanctions cannot be understated. Black, brown, and white players across the Americas were affected by the ban, and the fledgling Venezuelan league would find it difficult to survive without the ability to import American and Cuban players.
Resolution to the crisis came in waves. Organized Baseball escaped the Mexican League challenge by addressing some of their players’ grievances in 1946, an unprecedented action by the notoriously tightfisted league. The sanctions imposed by Chandler threatened to hurt the Cuban League so direly that it signed an agreement with Organized Baseball in June 1947, relinquishing the autonomy that it had cherished for half a century.[23] The Venezuelan league signed a similar agreement, as did leagues in Puerto Rico and Panama. No longer would the exchange of players occur freely and without the interference of the majors.
Briefly, Venezuela hosted banned players in the form of a small, independent league based in Maracaibo, called the Liga Marabina (named after the region’s demonym), or the Liga del Estadio Zulia (named after the stadium in which they played).[24] With the influx of money from Maracaibo’s nearby oil fields, such a league was possible. Historian Roberto González Echevarría calls the league the “last bastion of independent baseball” in an era of increasing Organized Baseball hegemony. Venezuela’s professional circuit had been brought into the fold of Organized Baseball, and the majority of Venezuelan players—whether they decamped to the US to play in the majors or the Negro Leagues, found opportunities in other leagues in the Caribbean, or stayed in their home country to play before their compatriots—found themselves under the thumb of American baseball governance.
Baseball, oil, Venezuela, and the United States were wrapped up in each other from the highest levels of government to the workers in the oil fields. American corporations beared down upon Venezuela, profiting handsomely off the country’s oil while subjugating Venezuelan workers to segregation, low pay, and other labor affronts. Organized Baseball, which had been happy to receive a number of Venezuelan players starting in 1939 and send scores of pros south to play in the winter, had exercised greater control over the region in the form of coerced agreements produced by sanctions. The balance of power between the United States and Venezuela, as well as their respective professional baseball leagues, had shifted dramatically in the 1930s and 1940s.
By the 1950s, Venezuela’s position in the American imperial sphere and in the international baseball ecosystem was well established. Latin American players were admitted into American professional baseball in ever-increasing numbers, and a handful of Latin American stars had emerged in the majors, including Venezuela’s own Luis Aparicio, Jr. Aparicio was still unique among major leaguers, though, as only six Venezuelans debuted by the close of the decade. Such limited participation wouldn’t last long; the number of Venezuelans in the majors would grow exponentially, doubling in the 1960s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. American intervention in Venezuela was not slowing down, and a political rupture on the horizon would radically change baseball in the United States and Latin America for more than half a century.
Luis Aparicio (running) with the Chicago White Sox. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.
[1] Peter C. Bjarkman, Baseball with a Latin Beat: A History of the Latin American Game (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1994), 2.
[2] “Luis Valbuena, José Castillo Killed in Car Crash Caused by Bandits, Officials Say,” ESPN, December 8, 2018: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25474553/luis-valbuena-jose-castillo-killed-car-crash-caused-bandits.
[3] Adrian Burgos, Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007) 17-20.
[4] Rob Ruck, Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 17-18.
[5] Bjarkman, 271.
[6] Gregory Wilpert, “The Economics, Culture, and Politics of Oil in Venezuela, last modified August 30, 2003, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/74.
[7] Rocio Cara Labrador, “Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate,” last modified January 24, 2019, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/venezuela-crisis.
[8] Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 157.
[9] Miguel Tinker Salas, “Life in a Venezuelan Oil Camp,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Fall 2015: 46-50, https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/life-venezuelan-oil-camp.
[10] Ruck, 70.
[11] A number of black American baseball teams adopted the “Cubans” moniker. The tradition began with the All Cubans, a team of Cuban players who barnstormed in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequent teams called the Cubans fielded a mix of Latin American players; New York Cubans owner Alex Pompez signed the first Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Panamanian Negro Leaguers to his club.
[12] Burgos, 120.
[13] Burgos, 151.
[14] Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 71.
[15] Snyder, 184-185.
[16] Burgos provides the best analysis of pre-Robinson challenges to the color line by Latinx players and the limited inclusion won by Latinx players while ideas of racialized difference persisted. For more on Griffith, black American players, and Latin American players, see Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators.
[17] Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 94.
[18] Roberto González Echevarría, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56. Not coincidentally, these new flight routes were made possible by Venezuelan acquisition of Lockheed aircraft, by then one of the largest US defense contractors. Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) is now the largest defense contractor in the world. More discussion of Lockheed Martin and US intervention in Venezuela will follow in subsequent sections.
[19] Kevin Kerrane, Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 11-12.
[20] Kerrane, 15.
[21] Samuel O. Regalado, “Latin Players on the Cheap: Professional Baseball Recruitment in Latin America and the Neocolonialist Tradition,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 8, no. 1 (2000): 9-20. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=ijgls.
[22] For more information on the Mexican League’s 1946 challenge, see Burgos, 163-176; and Ruck, 118-142.
[23] Ruck, 137.
[24] González Echevarría, 56.
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