Book Log 2010 #49: The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky

The town of San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic may be the worldwide per capita leader in creating major league baseball players, as they've sent 76 young men to the majors, with countless more in the minors. Why this is so is the central question of this book.

Kurlansky identifies several factors, including the area's general poverty, its reliance on the fickle sugar industry, the influx of people from outside the DR to work in sugar, the will of the dictator Trujillo to use baseball to consolidate his power, and the operation of "academies" by several major league teams looking to develop new talent on the cheap.

It should be an interesting read, given Kurlansky's ability to turn the mundane into the fascinating, but it's not. Things get too muddied between talking about the country, baseball (which Kurlansky almost always describes as if the reader knew of baseball as a concept but not as a sport), food, and other asides. The whole winds up being less than the sum of its parts, which is unfortunate.

There are a variety of books out there about Dominicans and baseball. It'd probably be better to start with one of those.