Border Report – Border Report Live: Baseball across borders

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) — The World Series is under way and one of the big stars on the field hails from the border.

Alejandro Kirk was born and raised in Tijuana. Now he’s the All-Star catcher for the Toronto Blue Jays.

He’s one of just a handful of Mexican-born players in the majors. In all, foreign-born players make up about one-third of MLB players on active rosters.

On this episode of Border Report Live, host Rudy Mireles and California correspondent Salvador Rivera talk baseball, the makeup of Major League Baseball, and how immigrants have affected the sport.

The Los Angeles Dodgers also have several foreign-born athletes, including Shohei Ohtani, of Japan, arguably the best player in the league.

For Border Report, which typically covers immigration and border-related issues, the big story is sometimes sports-related, and it’s often baseball.

Back in June, the Los Angeles Dodgers organization made headlines following reports that they denied immigration agents access to Dodger Stadium to help carry our an immigration-enforcement operation. Federal officials later denied that the officers turned away were members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Dodgers were also criticized for not immediately speaking out against ICE raids like other professional sports teams in Los Angeles. Then, reports surfaced that Mark Walter, the principal owner and chairman of the Dodgers, had ties to the GEO Group, which runs for-profit prisons and operates immigration detention centers around the country.

And in late July, a proclamation signed by President Donald Trump that limits entry into the United States for several countries prevented a youth baseball team from Venezuela from participating in the Senior League World Series in South Carolina after players were unable to obtain travel visas. The team ultimately received an exemption to compete. 

In more shocking news, a wanted cartel member shot and killed two Jesuit priests during a violent spree that started when the baseball team he sponsored lost a match in 2022 in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua.

Last October, baseball fans remembered Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican-born phenom who caused a frenzy — “Fernandomania” — on his way to winning the NL Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year in 1981.

He died as the Dodgers were getting ready to host the New York Yankees in the 2024 World Series. He was 63.

Valenzuela was the play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers’ Spanish broadcast.

In 2022, Dodger Stadium hosted a U.S. naturalization ceremony in which Valenzuela was honored as an Outstanding Americans by Choice recipient.

Join the award-winning Border Report team at borderreport.com for a daily, in-depth discussion about people living, working and migrating along the U.S.-Mexico border.

You can also watch past episodes of the Border Report Live, highlighting not only immigration and border security, but cartel violence in Mexico, border trade, politics and the U.S. and Mexico’s ongoing water dispute on the border.

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