My early research indicates that Latin American players tend to emphasize making contact (BB:K ratios are lower than people from other areas).  From this, I believe that they are trying to make bigger plays to get noticed.  Then, I'm going to look at isolated power over time to see if this is true and from there I have a couple of other things I'm going to do to see how this affects the number and playing time of Latin American players at the MLB level.

I am mixing this idea of evolutinary theories and culture as a sort of cultural evolution (though not in the racist ways of the past).  In this way, I am postulating that game strategies are a cultural resource that are taught to various people to maximize success using evolutionary theory.  That is, positive and successful strategies will be exploited while negative ones will be ignored or discounted.  These strategies are specifically designed to make players upwardly mobile.  Thus, things that help players make it to the MLB level from Latin America will be consistantly taught and thus a positive feedback loop will be created.  

Positive reasons include:

1. making writers look smarter for research grant reasons
   
2. Creating a sense of unity and culture within specific subfields
   
3. Creating a working language of ideas and concepts that are only useful inside a subfield

Unfortunately, that is how it is done and one lowly anthropologist isn't going to change it.  Hopefully, the actual thesis itself won't be so obtuse (and it won't) as I will have ample space to explain various principles and give reasons for my reserach and the way I am doing it.  Abstract writing is an important skill but it is quite specific in that it focuses on the ability to consolidate information into a very small space.

I do talk about game theory in some depth in my thesis and the thesis is pretty heavy in statistics and math.  

Centrality and Marginilzation are explained in the thesis also...but not in the opening abstract.

Centrality is the tendency to exclude non-whites from playing position that control action of teammates.  In baseball, these positions tend to be catcher, second base, and shortstop.  This is also a pretty easy analysis based on looking at playing time between groups.

These kinds of studies have been done before; however, their concepts of race/ethnicity were flawed.  A black player was often classified by looking at a photograph and deciding if the player "looked" black.  However, modern anthropologists (and biologists) look at race as a social rather than a biological construct (the biological race argument is very weak) and as such, outsider perspective isn't a useful tool for identification by itself.

Another trap: the phrase "to better ensure player's success at the major league level." There is a difference between this and "to increase the chances of getting noticed by mlb scouts," and as it stands I am not really sure what you are getting at.

On a separate note, are we allowed to split infinitives now? Anyone have any strong opinions on this?