Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike67
I'm just curious about something. If this is the wrong place for it, I apologize.
I'm making a quickstart for 1977 and Rod Carew is listed as American. He's from Panama.
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Rod was born on a train (and named after the doctor who delivered him, although the doc's surname might have been Klein or Kline rather than the Cline that is Rod's middle name) in Gatún, which was then part of the Panama Canal Zone. The Panama Canal Zone (
Panama Canal Zone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) was a US territory until 1979 and those born with in its limits were U.S. citizens, not Panamanians. Others who fall into this category include ABC's Sage Steele and Senator John McCain. It was somewhat ironic that the 2008 Presidential campaign had such an issue about whether Sen. Barack Obama was actually born in Hawai'i while McCain, his opponent, was definitely not born within the United States. But as a natural-born citizen of a US territory (even an unincorporated territory), McCain was eligible to run for President.
(The decision of President Jimmy Carter to return the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979 was rather controversial; he was attacked over this by various Republican candidates during the 1980 Presidential campaign.)
A similar case is Ron Gardenhire, who was born on a couch at the US army base in Butzbach, West Germany. Had he been born in a local hospital, he would still have been a US citizen, as a child of a serviceman abroad, but it would be correct to say he had been born "in West Germany". But since the base was leased US territory, and he was physically born on the base, he is properly listed as American. Same for Glenn Hubbard (Hahn AFB, born in the base hospital), Craig Leffert (97th General Hospital, Munich), Rob Belloir (base hospital, Heidelberg Army Barracks), and Mike Blowers (base hospital, Würzburg Army Base). In contrast, while current MLBers Jeff Baker (Bad Kissingen) and Edwin Jackson (Neu-Ulm) were born to U.S. servicemen in Germany, there was no military hospital in those cities (nearest to Bad Kissingen was Würzburg, nearest to Neu-Ulm was Augsburg) and so they were actually born in Germany. (Jackson, the son of an army cook, spent the first eight years of his life in Germany, and likely has dual citizenship.)
So, yes, a bit of a mess, but the game has it right. (With one exception, that I'll note in a separate post, below.) They've even fixed this since v15, when Gardenhire was listed as being German.