Customer Reviews

Stealing Lives: The Globalization of Baseball and the Tragic Story of Alexis Quiroz

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I found Stealing Lives a great book and I will recomend it to everyone who wants to know the dark side of baseball in its relationship with Latinoamerica. A reviewer claimed that the office established by the Commissioner's Office in the Domincian Republic is not discussed in the book when actually is deeply analysed in several chapters. ...

A really great book about a side of baseball that is not often analyse. It is a must read for every baseball fan that wants to know exactly how is the recruitment proccess of baseball players in Latin America!

As a reader I am being asked to believe that Major League Baseball is institutionally exploiting children in developing nations. Quite a claim! What kind of evidence and what kind of methods do these authors present to make their case? The best I can make of it is that they have systematically searched for cases that would confirm their conclusions. This is bad enough in itself, but their conclusions seem to have come at the beginning of their work, rather than at the end.
The cases they rely upon are, in my investigation of similar events, swamped by others that indicate clubs ranging along a continuum from poor to good. Moreover, the Commissioner's Office has established an office in the Domincian Republic that is regulating all of the organizations down there (working closely with the Dominican Commissioner of Baseball). Where is this discussed? What kind of method on their part resulted in the selection of the Chicago Cubs, rather than the Houston Astros? Or the particular Venezuelan they chose to highlight? The absence of much in the way of first hand accounts of people involved with organizations or the Commissioner's Office makes me wonder how this whole book was generated.
The worst part of this work is that it represents a rank form of ethnocentrism, a bias in which we see other cultural behavior through the lens of our own culture. We usually associate this with conservative thinking. Clearly, that's not the case. Ethnocentrism, in this case, is aided by dreadful research resulting in interpretations of situations in other cultures that are misleading, and often simply wrong.