SPONSORED BY NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AND THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY

Nov. 14, 2008

The Borders of Free Agency: Dominican Athletes in the Baseball World,
1975-2006

Daniel Gilbert
Dept. of History
Macalester College

We are pleased to invite you to the Chicago Seminar on Sport and Culture at the Newberry Library, co-sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University and North Central College. All sessions begin at 3:30 PM. The lectures are open to the public at no charge. The Newberry Library is located at 60 W. Walton, Chicago, IL.

One of the most important developments in the recent history of professional baseball has been the emergence of the “baseball academy” system in the Dominican Republic. This paper considers the academy system’s impact on both the trajectory of Dominican professional baseball and the reconfiguration of the wider baseball world since the late 1970s.
The paper argues that the academy system brought a fundamental shift to the place of Dominican identity in the baseball world, as Major League Baseball’s teams increasingly incorporated and mobilized forms of Dominicanness within their own talent development and marketing initiatives. The paper considers this development as a signal component of the labor history of baseball’s era of free agency, a history defined as much by new practices of enclosure as by new promises of mobility.

Daniel Gilbert teaches in the American Studies department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He recently completed his doctoral work in American Studies at Yale University, with a dissertation titled Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency.

For further information, contact Steve Riess at 773 442 5631 or

Steven Riess