Winners and losers, a home run derby.
While watching major league baseball’s home run derby, I recalled a word of wisdom from that Yankee guru, Yogi Berra, Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.
The home run derby precedes the All Star Game, a mid-season break when the best players in baseball get together to play a game, American League vs National League. A Seattle Mariners’ rookie, Julio Rodriguez, was chosen to play and he had a spot on the home run derby roster. Rodriguez is having a terrific year. With a big smile and great play, he’s acquired the nickname J-Rod, a throwback to another great Mariners’ player, Alex Rodriguez, who went on to a big bucks career in Texas and then the New York Yankees. J-Rod was born in the Dominican Republic.
He hit 32 home runs in the first round and made it to the home run derby’s final round against Juan Soto of the Washington Nationals and the Dominican Republic. Soto won. Another baseball great and for sure Hall of Famer when he retires, Albert Pujols, made the semi-final round. He’s Dominican, too. The Dominican Republic has produced dozens of major league baseball greats, men like David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Bartolo Colon, Sammy Sosa, another great Mariner named Carlos Santana and too many more to list here. President George W. Bush once owned the Texas Rangers. After he left office a reporter asked him if he had any regrets, and he said yes, trading Sammy Sosa.
Dominica’s neighbor, Haiti, has produced no ballplayers.
So, what is that all about?
Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy the island of Hispañola with a border near the middle of the island. France colonized Haiti and French is still the official language with most Haitians also speaking Haitian Creole. Spain colonized the other side of the island and Spanish is still the official language. Both colonies gained independence in the early 1800’s, and both were occupied by US Marine Corps forces in the early 1900’s who ran the countries for ten years or more, mostly for the benefit of North American business interests. For this former Marine, it’s not a proud part of our history. But the similarities soon fade.
The Dominican Republic, while not a first world nation, has prospered. According to the World Bank it has the 7th largest economy in Latin America with trade in construction, manufacturing, tourism, and mining, in addition to a steady supply of great baseball players. Its GDP per capita is just over $10,000.
Haiti by contrast is a basket case and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Its GDP per capita is just under $2,000 and 20% of that comes from remittances from people who left. While at one time Haiti produced baseballs, those factories were moved elsewhere, and its primary export today appears to be human refugees, thousands of whom board leaky boats or make long walks through Mexico and across the Rio Grande River to get here.
Some scholars attribute the divergent trajectories of these neighboring countries to the differences in the colonial occupiers. The French tended to view its colony as a place to extract wealth from slave labor with no regard for the humans, they brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to work on the sugar plantations where life expectancy was short. Starting in 1791, Haitian revolutionaries led by Toussaint Louverture and others took over the colony, seized the property of the white owners and killed them off. When Haiti gained its independence, the French imposed a huge monetary debt that only recently was paid off.
While Spain used slave labor in its colony, too, the Spanish also built hospitals and universities, seemed to have a more benevolent approach to its slave population and didn’t impose any punitive sanction when its colony gained independence. In its place, the capital flow went in the other direction: the Dominicans encouraged European investment.
I don’t know why these two occupants of the same island ended up so miserably different. To be sure, choices had something to do with it. Maybe Haiti should try Little League.