Singapore Major Leaguer

It was never our intention, prior to creating Baseball Purist, to spend all of our time focusing on the ills of the current game, in terms of the most recent rule changes.  If that were the case, then this blog would simply be too negative.  Instead, we will spend posts such as this one to celebrate the game, since we regard a baseball purist as one who revels in the history and minutiae of the game as well as the current highlights and action.

With that understanding, we thought about where players come from and the answer is obviously not just from the United States.  We then asked the question, “Has there ever been a player who played in the major leagues from Singapore?”  The answer is both yes and no.  Only one player has ever played in the major leagues who was born in Singapore, but that player was never a citizen of that country.  That player was Robin Jennings who played briefly for four major league teams (Chicago, Oakland, Colorado and Cincinnati) briefly from 1996 through 2001.  Robin’s father was in the US foreign service, so although his son was born in Singapore, he was always an American citizen.  After living the first eight years of his life overseas in Singapore, Jakarta, Bonn, Paris and Geneva, Robin and his family relocated back to the US and ended growing up in the Washington DC area. 

Although Robin’s time in the major leagues was brief, he did spend 13 years in the minor leagues.  There is not too much about him online, but we did learn a little bit more about him from this online interview that seems to be somewhat old but this YouTube video from two years ago, seems to provide a bit more detail about his life now.

Robin seems like an introspective type of person and it appears that he has lived in Park City, UT for some time now.  What was interesting from listening to this video was that if he had to do it all over again in terms of sports, he would have chosen tennis, since he now feels in hindsight that he would have had more control over his sports career.  Finally, one last article we found shows that he is also an investor in a private club in Sarasota, Florida named Waterworks.