Dominican Baseball Books

The Dominican Baseball Guy has posted on Dominican Baseball Books before. Basically the two most important books on Dominican Baseball are Alan Klein's Sugarball and Rob Ruck's The Tropic of Baseball. These are from a cultural anthropologist and a historian.

There are several other books which talk briefly about baseball in the Dominican Republic and they are listed on the Dominican Baseball Guy's first post on books.

A new book has been published by Mark Kurlansky which I think will be just as important as these first two I mention. Kurlansky is a journalist that has written on culture. He wrote two books that have been used in some of my anthropology classes: Cod and Salt. These both cover the history and culture of these two foods. Both are extraordinary.

His latest work is The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris. The Dominican Baseball Guy is so excited about this book he can hardly contain himself. Kurlansky is known for taking one subject (like Cod), and writing an all encompassing history of that subject.

San Pedro de Macoris is known as the town of shortstops. The Dominican Baseball Guy has talked before about all the shortstops and MLB players in general that have come from this town. They include Sammy Sosa, Robinson Cano, and Julio Franco. There have been 79 Pedromacorisanos in all play in MLB. An amazing number for a town of around 200,000 people. My hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas has had maybe 2 or 3 MLB players (including the surrounding areas) in my lifetime. And we are a city of 300,000 people. It is really astonishing.

Here is one review of the book, and another, and another. This should be a great read and tell you a lot about baseball in the Dominican Republic and in San Pedro de Macoris. One interesting thing to note from the title is that the Dominican Winter Baseball League team from this city is known as the Eastern Stars.