Prologue

I have decided to begin a blog to accompany and document my historical forays, and also as a tool to motivate and encourage myself to continue in doing so. I am beginning this with personal intentions, although if it is of interest to anyone else, a part of my role as a historian may be slightly fulfilled. 

My primary interest is the development of baseball in the early modern Caribbean, especially the Dominican Republic. My master's thesis, to be defended this spring, deals with this phenomena in the context of the U.S. occupation of the island during the First World War, the nature of Dominican resistance to foreign rule, and the role of the urban intellectuals of Santo Domingo, or letrados, in the advent of the Dominican game. 

The name for this blog comes from one particular exchange between the Dominican letrados who covered baseball in the capital. In a tradition not unique to Dominican baseball (I'll expand on this in a later post), Dominican letrados, writing anonymously, associated their baseball discourse with a poetic tradition. One writer, going only by Goitia, composed:

¿Se puede volver a la vida

después de tirarse al mar?

Is it possible to return to life

after being thrown into the sea?

The sea as a metaphor is common in the various baseball diatribes I've encountered in my research, not surprisingly due to the proximity of the Caribbean. I could not help but wonder if the usage of "thrown into the sea" is an allusion to the Gospel of Mark. I am not certain there is a connection, but an additional vein of my layperson's historical interest is biblical scholarship, I felt the title was sufficient in encompassing whatever I may write about or share here.

Listin Diario (Santo Domingo), October 31, 1917.