American Dreamer

One of the few Muslims to play pro baseball discusses what the ban and the U.S. mean to him.

- Dr. Khalid Ballouli

I’VE SEEN the scars on my father’s body. It’s not clear whether they’re from a knife or from bullets. He doesn’t talk about his time in the Lebanese army in the early 1970s. That was a dangerous time, and it got to be too much for my grandparents, so they told my dad, Walid, to get out of the country.