Originally posted by Barcelona:
Is Albert Pujols from the Dominican Republic? If you had to prepare a list with the best 20 current baseball players, what percentage would be from a caribbean country (Dom. Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua...)?
i would say that in mlb, the vast majority of those are from the dominican republic. the rest of those have a handful of good players in mlb, i.e., venezuela has johan santana. cuba has the hernandezesess and jose contreras (and, jose canseco and rafael palmeiro).
taking the numbers from yahoo's final player rankings (quibble all you want about that), these are the 20 best players from this past season (noting that that does not include barry bonds)-
1) Alex Rodriguez (New York)
2) Albert Pujols (Dominican Republic)
3) Derrek Lee (California)
4) David Ortiz (Dominican Republic)
5) Mark Teixeira (Maryland)
6) Mariano Rivera (Panama)
7) Manny Ramirez (Dominican Republic)
Chris Carpenter (New Hampshire)
9) Johan Santana (Venezuela)
10) Billy Wagner (Virginia)
11) Jason Bay (Canada)
12) Joe Nathan (Texas)
13) Dontrelle Willis (California)
14) Alfonso Soriano (Dominican Republic)
15) Pedro Martinez (Dominican Republic)
16) Andruw Jones (Curacao)
17) Gary Sheffield (Florida)
18) Miguel Cabrera (Venezuela)
19) Vladimir Guerrero (Dominican Republic)
20) Andy Pettitte (Louisiana)
so, the numbers show that 9 of the top 20 are U.S. born, 6 are from dominican republic, 2 from venezuela and 1 each from canada, curacao and panama.