Quote:
Originally Posted by BirdWatcher
The population of the Dominican Republic is 10.63 million (as of 2018.) There are roughly 145 players currently in the MLB who are from the Dominican Republic.
The population of the State of Texas is 29 million. During the 2019 season there were 92 players in the MLB who were born in Texas.
As I've mentioned in a previous post here, total population of a place or demographic grouping of peoples bears very little relation to the number of athletes at the highest reaches of any particular sport. There are many reasons that this argument, which feels like it would be quite logical, just doesn't hold water.
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That's right, and the reasons for the Dominican Republic's outsized contribution to baseball are well known. Are there any similarly powerful factors that would explain how the black tenth of the U.S. population could, by hypothesis, have had as large a pool of Major League caliber players as the other ninety percent?