Young, foreign-born Latino prospects, who are not eligible for Major League Baseball's lucrative draft because they are not U.S. citizens, sign as free agents for thousands of dollars to play in the minors, while American prospects get hundreds of thousands.
"You can hire 10 Dominican players for the price of one American college player," Shultz said. "That college kid [Stephen Strasburg] who signed with the Washington Nationals for millions? That deal doesn't happen for kids coming out of Dominican baseball academies."
Last fall, Shultz, an anthropologist and education professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Montgomery County, began teaching "Baseball and Beisbol: The Evolution of Race and Ethnicity in the Major Leagues," focusing on the tangled history of Latino ballplayers before and after Jackie Robinson broke MLB's color line.
"Everybody talks about Jackie Robinson, but nobody knows what happened with the Latino players," Shultz said. "I've spent my entire life trying to make sense of this mystery."
Shultz's passion for scrutinizing the culturally controversial back alleys of the majors comes from his extraordinary past.
His German-Jewish father's family escaped the Holocaust on one of the last boats out of Europe in 1939.
His parents moved from New York to Puerto Rico in 1948, a year before Shultz was born, to open a factory there, so he grew up on a farm near Arecibo in the 1950s, playing baseball in a pasture 100 feet from his house.
The bases were cow patties. The dozen or so kids he played with were part of the extended Puerto Rican family that owned the farm.
