raising the fever for the game. It is a more personal relationship with the players and their communities, which has helped Dominican baseball to remain much closer to the way the game was in the United States before media and corporate ownership deepened the divide between players and fans. A rather simple answer is that baseball is their lives. Every boy grows up with a bat and a ball, and everyone gets a chance to play. Baseball in the Dominican Republic, in comparison to the United States, is baseball, basketball, football and nintendo rolled into one culture. I have to use the term culture, because baseball in the Dominican Republic has transcended the boundaries of sport. It has become an extraordinary part of their daily lives. Earlier in the century, the first championship games in Santo Domingo were attended by a crowd exceeding twenty thousand when the population of the city was slightly over thrity thousand. Baseball has evolved into a national culture in the Dominican Republic, with the enthusiasm and the passion for the sport in the Dominican Republic to only have grown since....
