There is no Latin American Jackie Robinson, no single Hispanic ballplayer who lifted his people onto his back and crashed through baseball’s racist barricades.

But there always has to be a first, and many of the game’s historians point to two Cubans, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who made their debut with the Cincinnati Reds a century ago.

Of course, baseball was still segregated then. The Reds took great pains to highlight the irreproachable ethnicities of their newest employees: Yes, they were Cuban, but they were purebred Spaniards, without so much as a trace of African blood.

One thing that was not in dispute was that the Cubans could play. “Uncle Sam’s monopoly of the baseball market has been seriously threatened,” one reporter surmised, noting that “this little nation of brown men whom Uncle Sam set up in the nation business” was liable to “rise up and lick Sammy at his own game.”

Politics has prevented us from testing the accuracy of this prediction. As a source of talent, Cuba, whose diamonds are off-limits to American prospectors, produces a small fraction of the Hispanic players who now represent more than a quarter of all major leaguers and an even larger percentage of those in the minors. No American institution owes a greater debt to Latin Americans than baseball. Our national pastime would be nothing today without the likes of Pujols, Bautista and Reyes, and it all started with Almeida and Marsans, who played in their first major league game on — I’m not making this up — July 4, 1911.

So how is baseball honoring their legacy, almost exactly 100 years later? By holding its 2011 All-Star Game in the cradle of America’s new nativism.

In a season in which one of baseball’s cornerstone franchises has been neglected and abused by its warring husband-wife ownership team and another one has been reduced to collateral damage in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the history of Wall Street, this is every bit as shameful.

It all started innocently when Arizona was awarded the game, a tourist bonanza, in spring 2009. This was before the state’s anti-immigration movement gave birth to the law known as Senate Bill 1070, which effectively legalized racial profiling by requiring Arizona’s police to question people about their immigration status under certain circumstances.

The law backfired, inviting national scorn, costly boycotts and a lawsuit from the Obama administration. Arizona was given an out last year when a federal court struck down some of the most controversial aspects of the law. Rather than walking away, the state pressed on, vowing to appeal to the Supreme Court. Its petition for a hearing will arrive in the justices’ chambers on July 11 — one day before baseball’s biggest stars will presumably take the field in Phoenix for the midsummer classic.

If the outlines of this story sound familiar, that may be because it isn’t the first time Arizona’s politics have collided with the world of sports. In 1991, the state lost the 1993 Super Bowl after it refused to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a paid holiday for state workers. The NFL recognized that silence was not an option, that to do nothing was to do something. Last year, the Phoenix Suns made the same calculus. Their managing partner, Robert Sarver, publicly denounced S.B. 1070, while his team suited up for an NBA playoff game in jerseys that read, “Los Suns.”

For its part, baseball, which once helped drag our nation toward desegregation, has opted to do nothing. This despite plenty of warnings, and not just from Enrique Morones, the former director of Hispanic marketing for the San Diego Padres, who has for more than a year now been dangling the threat of an All-Star Game protest over Commissioner Bud Selig’s head. Last month, the Mexico-born musician Carlos Santana, accepting an award at baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game in Atlanta, reprimanded Georgia for passing a copycat version of Arizona’s legislation, saying both states should be “ashamed” of themselves.

Baseball may dismiss the opprobrium of a Latino activist and long-haired guitarist, but what about the Mexican-American slugger Adrian Gonzalez, one of a number of Latino players who have talked about boycotting the game if it is not moved out of Arizona? Selig is no doubt hoping that because the courts have thus far prevented the law from being enacted, players will come. This is a technicality. The larger truth is that Arizona’s anti-immigrant fervor is still very much alive, and Selig is putting his Latino players in the impossible position of having to choose between showing solidarity to their people or to the game that has enriched them even as they have enriched it.

Selig’s silence would not be so noteworthy if it were not part of a larger pattern. Adrian Burgos Jr., in his fascinating book, “Playing America’s Game,” details how baseball’s color line moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, for Latinos, with franchises gradually signing increasingly dark-skinned players. Their race always mattered less than the fact that they were foreign and poor, which meant they could be paid well below market rates.

Baseball loves to celebrate the role it played in the civil rights movement, and deservedly so. But we hear much more about the declining number of African-Americans in baseball, a legitimate concern, than we do about the issues that affect the sport’s ever-growing Latino population or, for that matter, the contributions of its Latino heroes. The Yankees’ Mariano Rivera is the last active player to wear Jackie Robinson’s number, 42, which was retired by Major League Baseball in 1997. Yet when Rivera’s former teammate LaTroy Hawkins wanted to don No. 21 a few years back in honor of Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican star who was killed in a plane crash in 1972 while on his way to provide relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua, Yankees fans revolted: that was Paul O’Neill’s number.

Selig has embraced the game’s diversity when it has suited him, doing his best imitation of the NBA’s great globalizer, David Stern, with the international marketing initiative known as the World Baseball Classic. But it was on Selig’s watch that baseball’s Latin American problem reached a point that could no longer be ignored.

I’m talking about, among other things, the American baseball “academies” in the Dominican Republic, which could just as aptly be described as baseball plantations. The teenagers inside their barbed-wire-topped walls are sold by local scouts to big league teams or private investors who will ultimately profit off a chosen few and return the rest to lives of poverty. Given the starkly different fates that await them, it’s hardly surprising that 13 of the top 40 Dominican prospects came up positive for performance-enhancing drugs last year. What’s more surprising is that it was the first time they had been tested. Meanwhile, the FBI is reportedly investigating allegations that major league scouts and team officials have for years been skimming the signing bonuses of their Dominican prospects.

It would be unfair to say that baseball has not at least started to tackle some of these issues, however belatedly. Sandy Alderson, who served briefly as baseball’s point man in the Dominican Republic before becoming general manager of the Mets last fall, created some momentum for change, drafting an ambitious reform blueprint. His plan featured mandatory classes at all academies owned by major league clubs, as well as the creation of a tuition-assistance fund for prospects who don’t make it off the island and want to go back to school.

But just as baseball finally seemed poised to end its long history of exploiting Latin Americans, it is once again turning its back on them. It’s too late for Selig to move the All-Star Game. It’s not too late for him to speak out, forcefully, against the anti-immigration movement.

If he doesn’t, the choice he’s giving his Latino players may not be so impossible after all. “We have to back up our Latin communities,” said the reigning home run king, Jose Bautista, when asked about the game last year.

Who would blame him for staying home?