An Ohio Reader Says An All-American Line Up In Major League Baseball Is Not Hard
08/22/2008
08/21/08 — A New Jersey Reader Says Russia Isn’t The Problem — Mexico Is!
From: Jim Hickman
Re: Joe Guzzardi’s Column: Abolishing America’s Sport (contd.): Why Not Limit Foreign Players Like The Caribbean League?
I’m an amateur baseball historian and statistician following Guzzardi’s essays on foreign-born players in the Major Leagues.
Intrigued by his suggestion that putting an all-American line up on the field would not be hard, I set about analyzing various box scores to see what I could come up with.
Amazingly — and this should be of special interest to Guzzardi since he just moved to Pittsburgh — the Pirates during their recent four game series against the New York Mets, started nine all-American born players in three of the four contests.
The only exception was Pirate second-string catcher Raul Chavez who played Sunday’s game. Typically on Sunday the everyday catcher takes a rest.
Even more unusual, all the American-born players are white. See the line-ups here, here and here.
I’m not sure how far back in time one would have to go to find a comparable situation. But it could be as long as decades ago since such a demographic oddity occurred in baseball.
It proves Guzzardi’s point however. Plenty of American players are out there. And their skills are competitive enough to merit positions on major league squads.