Sports media shouldn’t dehumanize international players

When I was reporting on cracks in the system that non-English speaking international Minor League players fall through, a Latin American player mentioned to me that fans forget they’re people, too. I think that oversight extends to teams and media.

The international signing period for Major League Baseball (MLB) began on Jan. 15, with many eager to find out where Japanese pitcher Rōki Sasaki would sign. He inevitably did so, but in the clamor before signing with the reigning World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, one thing that stood out to me was Sasaki’s agent Joel Wolfe referencing the player’s mental health and negative media attention in Japan after saying he wanted to play in MLB, a desire considered to be disrespectful in Japan. 

Major League Baseball is a business, one where the success of teams is placed above the people themselves. 

International players like Sasaki are often thought of in terms of their value to their employer — not how their lives have changed as a result of coming to the United States to play professionally and their treatment as labor for a multi-billion dollar industry. They’re a microcosm of labor migration and, in sports media, have been subject to similarly dehumanizing language as migrants to the U.S. at large. With a lot of eyes on sports, the incorrect and negative narratives about migrants in the U.S. can carry over and, under this anti-migrant Trump administration, can serve as propaganda to further devalue their existence as people.

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Related: Better immigration reporting starts by questioning assumptions about migration

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Descriptions of Sasaki have included: how MLB teams have “coveted” him, that “he’s fully operational” (though a “test case”) when healthy, how he’s a “bargain and a coup” for the Dodgers, and that “whichever team is granted his services will have plenty of time to tinker around with the pitcher’s arsenal, training, and build” (from a website that wrote “we can do better” regarding how BIPOC players are covered). The Athletic and the print edition of the New York Times published a feature about Sasaki having survived a tsunami in third grade, a disaster in which he lost his father and paternal grandfather.

The sensationalizing of Sasaki’s traumatic past — in a story he declined to be interviewed for — shows how at either end of the commodification spectrum, whether for his value to a team or trotted out as a inspiration, the player has been objectified and dehumanized by media to drum up excitement for the sport.  

This wasn’t the first time this has happened to a baseball player who doesn’t speak English. If media continues this trend, it won’t be the last. 

Many signed international players are often teenagers who are not white and who speak little to no English. In the most recent TIDES (The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport) report for MLB, the league at its highest level was 30.2% Hispanic/Latino, 6.2% Black/African American, 3.2% Asian, 0.6% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 0.2% Native American, with 28.5% of players born outside the United States.

While they’re allowed to join the league at age 16, it’s not unprecedented for teams to sign players younger than that. The Philadelphia Phillies were reported to have an agreement with the then-12-year-old younger brother of current MLB players Ronald Acuña Jr. and Luisangel Acuña. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela (the birthplace of the eldest Acuña brothers) also have MLB Academies, where many children and teenagers go to hone their baseball skills, but also a place where they can first be scouted at a very young age, adding to the exploitative relationship; one of the more recent countries to have academies is Uganda, furthering the exploitative relationship.

Many of the times signees are first referenced in American media, it’s often with commodifying language at best, humanizing the teams employing them instead of the players themselves. After all, baseball is an industry where a broadcaster has referred to minor leaguers as “property of” whatever team signed them, a particularly gross, racist, and dehumanizing way to describe these players.

These players risk exploitation by a system that still pays them below living wages and can cut them from a roster when they’re no longer “valuable” to the team they play for. They are not afforded the same resources and privileges as white American baseball players, and in the wake of the current presidential administration’s immigration raids, there should be more consciousness about the language used when reporting on these players. 

Vera Institute for Justice cited numerous research studies showing “that using negative metaphors to describe immigrants shapes public opinion and robs immigrants of their individuality, which could make them seem less deserving of assistance and public sympathy.” The less international players are shown as human through commodifying metaphors, the more “disposable” they are seen by the public, especially if they are cut by teams.

The problem of language in sports media isn’t just localized to migrant players: while prospect evaluation and scouting language often refers to a player’s ability on the field, it’s also something players like Jo Adell have decried as anti-Black. This dehumanizing language is an institutional problem, and one that MLB needs to continue to reckon with. Sports media needs to, as well. Under the Trump administration that has already been threatening non-white migrants, it is the bare minimum that can and should be done.

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Jen Ramos Eisen is a Central California- and Las Vegas-based sports labor journalist and has covered Minor League Baseball since 2013.

James Salanga edited this piece. Copy edits by Holly Rosewood.