Summer 2007

(Preface:  While I promise this round will be a little more light-hearted than my previous philosophizing, I did a half-decent job at convincing myself this is true and there’s a part of me that wants to write a paper on it.  Let me know if you think I’m on to something.)

Many a scholar has tried to identify the root causes of poverty, and the island of Hispaniola provides a unique opportunity to put those theories to the test.  If we understand the differences between the DR and Haiti, perhaps we could understand what causes some countries to experience more economic development than others. 

One of the most noticeable differences is that Dominicans like baseball and Haitians like soccer.  One might conclude that it is the love of soccer that entraps people in poverty, while countries which adopt baseball progress more rapidly.

First, let us consider why playing baseball might allow a country to progress.  I would argue that the game of baseball teaches valuable life lessons about overcoming adversity that are difficult to encounter in any other sport.  Like a poor man who faces grim odds of working his way out of poverty, a batter must deal with the fact that he will only succeed about 30% of the time, if he is good.  He must learn to accept that he will not be rewarded often for his toil but that he must persevere and maintain his hunger to overcome.  A young boy who learns this lesson on the diamond will surely take it into anything he does.  After all, if one can hit a baseball, which has been called the hardest thing to do in any sport, one can surely work his way out of poverty.  Sometimes the two are tied together not just figuratively but also literally.  Remember the words of Slammin Sammy who said, “Beisbol has been bery bery good to me.”

But what about soccer; on what basis can we conclude that the love of soccer traps people in poverty?  Consider the economics of sports on Hispaniola.  I recently discovered that the price of a good soccer ball in Haiti is $50.  What bothered me was not so much the fact that I had to shell out this amount but rather trying to reconcile this with what I know about this island and sports.  The ball was clearly imported from the US (probably after being imported from some other country), all of which led to what I consider to be an extremely high price for a country in which everything else is extremely inexpensive, relatively speaking. 

However, every day as soccer balls are shipped into Haiti and poor Haitian communities pool their money for weeks so that they can play soccer, Haiti exports more baseballs than any other country.  The Dominicans on the other side of the island know this, and they have discovered that sports equipment that can be found locally is the way to go.  So they grab a hold of a lot of those baseballs before they leave the island and they improvise the rest, such as using milk cartons for gloves and bottle caps and cane sticks to practice hitting.

We can see that playing baseball on the island of Hispaniola is cheaper than playing soccer.  We can also see that the side of the island which has discovered this fact is more economically developed than the side which has not.  Perhaps this is not just a coincidence.

Skeptics may doubt this math and argue that the average soccer ball lasts through many more games than the average baseball.  While this is certainly true in the big leagues, I take this to be irrelevant in developing countries.  In my experience on the island of Hispaniola, lost balls are rarely a reality.  Whether it’s soccer or baseball, there is a group of young boys at every pick-up game whose sole responsibility is to fetch the balls that go out of play.  And whether this involves hunting through sugar cane fields for foul balls or wading out into the river downstream of an approaching soccer ball, the muchachos and ti moun have an uncanny ability to return the balls. 

I’m not sure that this can be applied to all countries, but I can say that if Haitians would just trade soccer for baseball, they could save a lot of money and would probably be better off.  Maybe I should give up trying to solve the water problem and introduce them to baseball.