Where do baseball players come from?

Think

I’ve always been very interested in where players come from and how many top flight players various countries produce in any sport. Watching sports with large international tournaments makes this easy to compare:

Soccer has the World Cup and numerous continental championships.
Basketball has the Olympics and a host of continental championships.
Hockey has the Olympics and… well, very few countries play hockey so the Olympics are all they really need for the big boys but in addition to that there are a number of international tournaments for various levels of play.

Baseball though… it has only really begun to branch out it’s international competitions in the last few years but even then it has a rather haphazard qualification and final tournament with only 28 countries actually supplying teams (and with many of those teams featuring a majority of players born and/or trained outside of the countries they represented).

So…

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