In between rounds of batting practice in the Florida sun, the Venezuelan-born Minnesota Twins catcher Willians Astudillo comes over and takes off his catcher’s mask, revealing a mess of blond-highlighted curly hair.



For nearly 130 years, young men like Astudillo have been trying to break into the big leagues in baseball at spring training – their annual chance to impress the owners of Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs, and for the fans a chance to check out talent before the season’s opening on Thursday.



The 26-year-old Astudillo, a career .311 hitter, has been a star of the minor leagues, which act as training grounds for the big teams, for the last few years and is hoping for a permanent spot with the Twins this year.



But this year there’s a cloud over baseball. And as players prepare for the new season, Astudillo says that in the clubhouse, one subject is on the mind of his fellow Latino ball players – Trump’s immigration policies.



“We are conscious of everything happening, and the situation this country is currently in. It is regrettable,” said Astudillo as he took a swig of water in the Twins’ dugout. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s much-litigated travel ban that includes some people from Venezuela.



Baseball has long played a key role in conversations on racial equality in the United States. Jackie Robinson integrated the Major Leagues nearly eight years before Brown v Board of Education integrated public schools.



At a time when immigrants are under attack, “America’s pastime”, a third of whose players are Latino, could play a key role in helping to overcome barriers to racial equality for immigrants.



Donald Trump swings a Marucci baseball bat in the Blue Room during a ‘Made in America’ product showcase event at the White House on 17 July 2017. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

The Oakland A’s president, David Kazal, said his team was holding its first ever Cesar Chavez Day this weekend – celebrating the labor leader as part of Opening Day weekend festivities as a way to continue to use baseball as an integrating force.



“Education and learning is critical for the success, especially, of a democracy,” said Kaval.



“Obviously we are a commercial business but by the same token we provide a societal benefit where people come together across socio-economic, ethnic, racial, religious lines to share a love of baseball,” said Kaval. “And bringing people together in that setting is powerful and it shows people unity as opposed to their division and we want to do everything we can to enhance that.”



However, the Trump-supporting political spending of many MLB owners and their push to exempt the increasingly Latino minor leagues from US minimum wage laws has raised questions about how committed team owners are to their Latino players and their growing Latino fanbase.



Last year immigrant players made up a record high percentage of professional opening day rosters. About 31% of all professional baseball players and approximately 50% of all minor leaguers are Latinos.



Team owners rely heavily on this immigrant workforce, although only one out of 50 players actually make it to the big leagues after a three- or four-year journey through the minor leagues.



Throughout Latin America, all 30 baseball teams run dormitory-style academies that offer free room and board to boys as young as 13, who drop out of school to pursue their dream.



When clubs sign players in Latin America, they are able to skirt the league’s draft rules of minimum signing age, signing them as young as 16 without representation. Often, they get only a few thousand dollars signing bonus, and a minimum wage of only $1,100 a month to work for a mere five months a year; in contrast US-born top draft picks of comparable talent are signed for bonuses worth millions of dollars.



Since the league’s regulations on signing players from abroad are lax, “the cost savings are as appealing as the talent,” Pedro Peguero, then GM of the baseball academy owned by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Dominican Republic, told the New York Times when the Dodgers opened their academy there in the late 1990s.



Despite baseball being a $10bn-a-year industry, the Save America’s Pastime Act signed by the Trump administration last week will permanently exempt minor league players from federal minimum wage laws.



“I would see eight Latino guys piled into a two-bedroom apartment. No furniture, just air mattresses everywhere,” said Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher turned lawyer, who is leading a class-action wage theft lawsuit on behalf of minor league ballplayers. “[The exemption] hits Latinos the hardest for sure.”



Major League Baseball also increasingly depends on Latino fans.



Roberto Clemente helped redefine the role Latinos played in baseball. Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty Images

As the sport loses its popularity among black and white millennial audiences, baseball profits have been buoyed by growing Latino viewership abroad and domestically.



In 2016, after a campaign launched by the Latino ad agency Latinworks in conjunction with MLB called “Ponle Acento”, or “Put the Accent on It”, MLB debuted new player jerseys with Spanish accent marks.



Now Minor League Baseball is working hard as well to attract Latino fans with its own Copa de la Diversión program to create alternative minor league uniforms and mascots based on symbols in Latino culture.

Many ballclubs go to great lengths to market themselves to Latino fans domestically and overseas.



The Pirates renamed the bridge that fans cross over before games the Roberto Clemente Bridge, after the Latino superstar. The Pirates have even supported a campaign to retire Roberto Clemente’s No 21 as Major League Baseball did with Jackie Robinson’s 42 shirt.



“Talk about having a voice,” said Mike Gonzalez, who serves as the Pirates’ assistant to the general manager and coordinator of cultural initiatives. “Even today, when it’s easier to have a voice, sometimes we hesitate about speaking out. Clemente was living in a time when you were not allowed to talk and he still spoke up.”



It’s a sensitive issue. After the Guardian interviewed Gonzalez, the Pirates revoked the Guardian’s credentials and initially refused to answer follow-up questions.



In an email Pirates spokesman Dan Hart said the team’s general manager “wasn’t comfortable with the angle of the story”.



The Pirates communications director, Jim Trdinich, added: “We are proud of what we do for our players but we also believe it is a competitive advantage and do not have interest in sharing the details of our program with the public and by extension, our competitors.”



Earlier this month, the Pittsburgh Pirates president, Frank Coonelly, spoke at the annual Lincoln Day fundraiser for the Allegheny county Republican party featuring the Trump aide Kellyanne Conway and the anti-immigrant Republican candidate Rick Saccone before the bellwether Pennsylvania 18th congressional district special election.



In a sign of how toxic anti-immigrant politics could be to the team’s fanbase, Coonelly dismissed any suggestion that he was at the Republican fundraiser to campaign for Saccone or his anti-immigrant agenda. “I would be happy to talk about the Pirates to any group of Democrats, including those who might have positions on immigration more closely aligned with yours, if so invited,” Coonelly wrote in an email to the Guardian.



“The Pirates are strongly committed to the principles of diversity and inclusion,” said Coonelly. “We take our responsibility to carry on the legacy of the great Roberto Clemente very seriously, and we live that legacy daily.”



The idea that club owners hold Trumpian views on immigration is not limited to the Pirates. The Chicago Cubs co-owner Joe Ricketts also ran multimillion-dollar ads accusing the Democrat Conor Lamb, who won the race, of being in favor of “sanctuary cities”.



Jose Altuvé, one of the best Latino players in the Major Leagues, greets Donald Trump at a White House reception for the champion Houston Astros. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

While the Golden State Warriors did not go to the White House after winning the 2017 NBA championship to show their opposition to Trump’s policies, the Houston Astros gladly agreed to a photo op with Trump, featuring several all-star Latino players.



However, not all baseball owners are happy with the Trump administration.



In 2017, the Orioles owner and chief operating officer, Joe Angelos, said he would not invite Trump to throw out the first pitch at their Camden Yards ballpark because of Trump’s views on race.



Angelos said that he was most outraged by Trump’s immigration policies, telling the Baltimore Sun that immigration officials were “essentially sending shock troops through neighborhoods to chase people around, which is outrageous on every level”.



Trump’s fear of getting booed at a baseball stadium led him to skip throwing out the ceremonial first pitch last year. He remains, along with Jimmy Carter, the only president not to throw out a first pitch while in office.



“America’s pastime, baseball, which I love very much, is going to play that [integration] role again,” said the Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva. “Like it or not, despite what owners are doing in terms of shoring up and propping up Donald Trump … Resistance will be there [in baseball] because immigrants have been exploited in every work sector in this country.”



“The ownership and the league itself are going to have realize that the fanbase, the consumers, and the players are all one entity so they are going to have to get there,” said Grijalva.



It’s a sentiment that many in baseball share in the age of Trump.



“We aren’t perfect,” said the Oakland A’s Kaval. “But we have to continue to strive to make those contributions.”



Karina Moreno is an assistant professor at Long Island University whose research specializes in immigration and security policy. Formerly an undocumented immigrant, she is originally from Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, and now resides in Brooklyn, New York.

