Baseball has been held up for decades, maybe forever, as the embodiment of the American dream, and that idealism lives on today even in the face of steroid scandals and millionaire bench-warmers. But somewhere in this global economy baseball became a universal fantasy, for Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans all dreaming of escaping poverty to play ball in la Estados.

Franchise owners, predictably, have cashed in on this dream, and now nearly every major league baseball team runs a training camp in the Dominican Republic, plucking raw talent from the slums and teaching them a bit of English before, if they're lucky, shipping them off to the minor leagues. Hundreds of young men come to America in this way every year, and Sammy Sosa and Manny Ramirez aside, most of them never make it beyond the farm leagues.