This is me there last year
The basic idea is to develop a greater understanding of labor rights for professional Venezuelan baseball players within the context of the Bolvarian Revolution and "21st Century Socialism."
Venezuela exports the 2nd most number of players to Major League Baseball after the Dominican Republic. Several MLB teams have training academies and franchise teams that play in the Venezuelan summer leagues. The highest paid pitcher in MLB, Johan Santana is from Tovar in the Merida state. Venezuela's contribution to American baseball is immense, but what happens to the thousands of players who do not sign multi-million dollar contracts supported by a relatively strong labor union in the US? Many players destroy their bodies making about $800 per month in Venezuela and most will never play baseball for a MLB team. One of the goals of this project is to understand these players' stories.
Understanding the political and economic climate in which these athletes compete is also of great importance. President Hugo Chavez (pictured above) proposed a 10% tax on MLB contracts signed by future Venezuelan big leagers. This obviously angered team owners and league officials in the US. Many teams have withdrawn their development teams which play in the Venezuelan summer league. As one of my favorite sports columnists Dave Zirin often points out, sports and politics are deeply intertwined yet we continually choose to ignore the linkages. With the Venezuelan government moving forward on a number of social, economic and political reforms, I feel it will be interesting to understand how Venezuelan baseball players are affected by those reforms with the hope that the broader implications for 'labor' can be revealed.
1 comments:
Hugo looks rather serious in that pic...like he's contemplating whether or not a shower of candy will pour out of Bush's hollow noggin if he smacks it just so.
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