The World Series Isn’t Global, But Baseball Players Are

The 2019 World Series kicks off tonight in Houston. “World Series” has always seemed a curious moniker, given that just one team in Major League Baseball—my adopted hometown’s, the Toronto Blue Jays—plays outside of the United States. But the word “world” is a better fit when it comes to baseball’s talent pool, which has become incredibly global.

Today, nearly three in 10 major-league players hail from outside the U.S., according to an analysis of the globalization of major-league baseball talent by my colleague at the University of Toronto School of Cities, Patrick Adler. Adler used Baseball-Reference data to track the country and metropolitan area of birth for major-league baseball players since 1900. There are numerous ways to track where a person comes from, but place of birth is the most stable and widely available data point, so he used that. On this analysis, someone who immigrated to the U.S. as a child would be counted as foreign-born.