International Education, Baseball Style

With the election of Andre Dawson to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have been thinking about one way that I initially became interested in other cultures – through baseball.   Let me explain:  from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Dawson played for the Montreal Expos, a major league baseball team that existed from 1969 through 2004.   They are now the Washington Nationals. Yesterday the New York Times ran a good story on the Expos – you can see it here. Despite the revisionist history about the Expos, they generally fielded competitive teams and had a loyal fan base.  Dawson, known as “The Hawk,” was star on some good teams and eventually moved on to play with the Cubs, the Marlins and the Red Sox.  But I always think of him as an Expo.

I was born into a family with deep New York roots  and unwavering support for the New York Yankees.  I shared (and still share) my family’s religious faith in the Bronx Bombers.  But in the 1970s my secret rebellion was to also follow the exploits of les Expos. The team was born around the time I was, they were colorful (their mascot was a large orange creature and one of their players, Rusty Staub, was known as le Grande Orange), they were scrappy underdogs – and they played in another country, in the heart of French-speaking North America, Montreal.

As a kid in upstate New York I would sit on my front porch at night and if the atmosphere allowed I would pick up the broadcast, in French, of the games from Montreal on my little AM radio.  I was taking French in school so could make out some of it (a new lexicon was designed for baseball en francais – le frappeur, le coup de circuit) but much of it was a blur.  Still, it sounded so exotic to me and in some way inspired me to study a little harder and maybe to connect more with the Quebecois students whose families had transplanted to New York State (the 1970s were a time of fairly incendiary political activism in Quebec on the issue of sovereignty).   Somehow that interest stuck.  I would take French through graduate school and later live in the North African part of la francophonie.   I am certain that the Expos played a part in my interest in international relations and that makes me think about ways in which we can interest today’s students in international things; I think that international soccer has certainly captured the attention of many.  Baseball itself also continues to become more international and Major League Baseball devotes part of their website to that subject – see it here. MLB noted that at opening day of the 2009 season:

Two-hundred twenty-nine (229) players on Opening Day rosters and disabled lists were born outside the 50 United States, it was announced today. Overall, 28.0 percent of the 818 players (748 active 25-man roster players and 70 disabled or restricted Major League players) on April 5th rosters were born outside the 50 United States, representing 15 countries and territories.

Others have written at length about the value of sports in public diplomacy (and I see that the figure skater and Fletcher School student Michelle Kwan has recently been named a “public diplomacy envoy” by the State Department).  But on this occasion, I am just happy for The Hawk’s election to the Hall of Fame and reveling in my nostalgia for scratchy broadcasts of baseball in French.