Baseball is beginning again in America, with players gathering at spring training sites in Florida and Arizona. But in the Dominican Republic, the sport never really stops. It is a year-round religion, a potential ticket out of poverty, and the result is that the country produces more major leaguers than any other nation on Earth, with the obvious exception of the United States.

Baseball is everywhere in the Dominican Republic, and the images it creates are both innocent and jarring. Outside the walls of all-inclusive resorts that sell paradise to tourists, Dominican kids in dollar flip-flops swing sticks at bottlecaps. Older boys live together under the supervision of a trainer, sleeping in crowded, stark rooms while hoping that their path will lead to a professional contract and a chance to play in one of the academies that every major league team operates on the island.

For the best of the players, the academies then become a launching pad into the American minor league system, and from there, possible paydays in the major leagues that dwarf the everyday reality in which most Dominicans reside.

And even that first contract can dramatically transform the lives of a player and his family. Raymel Flores was 16 when he signed with the Boston Red Sox in 2011 and received a $900,000 bonus. The money allowed his mother and brothers to leave their two-room home in a rural Dominican village and buy a new car and a new home in a nearby city.

Flores is one of the lucky ones. For others in the Dominican Republic, their baseball ambitions end up leading nowhere. Still, many dream, and many play, making baseball the sport so boldly stitched into the fabric of Dominican life, year after year after year.

