Baseball Dreams: Striking Out in the Dominican Republic

On a sweaty evening in Santo Domingo, Ramon Genao, a towering, beer-bellied man who goes by the nickname Papiro, marches through a dark, dank barrio. Papiro is about to show me where, if he’s lucky, the next Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz or Vladimir Guerrero resides. Papiro is a buscón, Spanish for searcher, one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of unlicensed scout-trainer-agents who scour the Dominican Republic for young, fresh baseball talent.

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The D.R. is baseball’s puppy mill. The buscones develop and sometimes feed and house these teenage players, with the intent of selling them to the highest bidder, a major league team willing to fork over thousands, if not millions, of dollars to secure a prospect. As a reward for their work, buscones typically pocket 25% to 50% of the prospect’s signing bonus. Many folks in the Dominican Republic resent being labeled a buscón because of the term’s other connotation: swindler.

A dead cockroach the size of a catcher’s mitt rests on the side of the stairway. Papiro ushers me into an apartment that is a comfortable fit for no one yet lodges five of his pupils, all from 15 to 18 years old. In the “living room,” there’s not a single furnishing other than a few plastic chairs. The light doesn’t work in one bedroom, and in another, a crater in the floor could swallow you whole. Only air drips from the kitchen sink. Papiro shows off the “terrace”: it’s a crunched, pitch-black walkway that houses a heap of trash.

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In a country as poor as the Dominican Republic, these quarters are an upgrade for many impoverished teenage boys. Still, even Papiro knows the place isn’t pretty. That’s by design. First and foremost, Papiro is an investor. And if these hopefuls don’t work hard and sign a contract, he’ll lose money. “If you make things too comfortable, in the morning they’ll never wake up,” says Papiro, through an interpreter. “I’ll give them vitamins and food. But no comfort.”

Aside from the U.S., more Major League Baseball (MLB) players are born in the Dominican Republic, a nation of 9.7 million, with a per capita GDP of $8,300, than any other country on the globe. Of the 833 major league players on opening-day rosters, 86 of them, more than 10%, hailed from the D.R. Next highest? Venezuela, with 58. About a quarter of the 7,000 minor league players are from the island nation that shares a border with Haiti.

Baseball, which has been played in the D.R. since the late 19th century, glorifies the rags-to-riches tales of so many Dominicans who make it to the majors. But buried beneath these charming yarns are the often cruel, sometimes criminal, ways in which all that Dominican talent gets curated. The absence of a school-based sports system forces teams to lean on buscones like Papiro. These trainees find prospects, sometimes as young as 11 or 12 years old, and tutor them in baseball so they can be signed once they turn 16. Buscones often pull kids out of school — Papiro’s players, for example, attend class once a week — to focus them on baseball. They have huge economic incentives to cheat. Age fraud and performance-enhancing drugs, which in the Dominican Republic can be bought like candy, are rampant. The families of these players see the sport as the only way out of abject poverty.

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To its supporters, the buscón system offers hope to many who have none. After all, in a country where even doctors and lawyers often make little money, why go to school? To critics, that kind of thinking is a cop-out that lowers the country’s expectations to dangerous levels. “In some ways, it’s like human trafficking,” says Arturo Marcano, a sports attorney who has written extensively on the effects of baseball globalization in Latin America.

Major League Baseball has finally recognized that Dominican baseball is broken. Still, the league deserves its fair share of blame for this mess. Several team employees have been fired for taking kickbacks from buscones. In 2000, MLB opened an office in Santo Domingo to oversee its Dominican affairs, but the league has admitted that its efforts have been underfunded. The living conditions in the baseball academies, created by MLB teams to train their Dominican signees, have vastly improved over the past decade. Many could use a face-lift, though.

What MLB can’t fix is the withering math of the professional game. Over the past decade, just 2% of Dominican players who signed with a team have made it to the majors. The country’s roadsides are lined with the failures — those who gave up school to chase a baseball career only never to see a single offer from a big-league club. Baseball has provided many real economic benefits to the Dominican Republic, plus immeasurable psychic delights to its citizens. But with these benefits comes a great social cost. “It borders on child exploitation when you’re a dream merchant,” says Charles Farrell, an American based in the D.R. who is trying to start a baseball-centric high school there, “and not delivering the dream.”

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A Baseball Education
In 1980, nine players from the D.R. were signed to minor league contracts; on average, they received a signing bonus of $1,266. Last year, teams signed 396 Dominican players; their average signing bonus was $94,023. That’s a huge improvement, but in a league where the average salary is $3.3 million, it signifies that the deep Dominican talent pool can still be tapped relatively cheaply. It’s why teams have made a huge investment in the island. If a Dominican boy is lucky, he’ll enroll in one of the academies that major league teams have established to house, feed and train their Dominican players. By 2000, every team had created an academy or program in the D.R. Some resembled prisons. “Most of them were horrible,” says Farrell, who was part of a group directed by MLB to study these facilities. “We found bugs in the rooms, cheese sandwiches for dinner.”

Now, Farrell says, academy conditions are “light years” ahead of where they were a decade ago. Teams have invested millions to spruce up facilities or build new ones. The San Diego Padres, for example, spent $8 million building an academy in Najayo, about 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Santo Domingo. Driving in, you start searching for golf courses and tennis courts: the place feels like a resort. Palm trees stand in front of the main building; the rooms are shiny and air-conditioned, with two single beds and a bathroom.

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Not all academies, however, resemble the Ritz. At the Cubs academy one hazy afternoon, 10 prospects piled into a room that, at best, could comfortably fit two or three. There were four bunk beds crammed into the space; two kids napped while sharing a mattress on the floor. Several players said they all lived in that room. I snapped a picture of the scene and showed it to Sandy Alderson, the veteran baseball executive who was tapped by MLB commissioner Bud Selig earlier this year to clean up the sport in the D.R. He said the conditions were “not acceptable,” though he later insisted that not all 10 prospects actually lived in that room and that players sometimes sleep on the floor because it’s cooler. Still, he stood by his “unacceptable” assessment. It’s difficult to disagree with a Dominican man who also saw the scene. “It looked like f______ county lockup,” he said.

The confines are much friendlier at the $5 million complex that the Pittsburgh Pirates — one of the worst teams in baseball — opened last year in a countryside town near the capital. Late one afternoon within the facility, the eyes of four players are fixed on a dry-erase board, on which a teacher is writing 11th-grade chemistry formulas. Eight more prospects, all over the age of 16 but with seventh- or eighth-grade educations, are being taught the basics of geometry.

Most teams require only basic English classes for their prospects. But if the Pirates, a small-market team with the lowest payroll in the majors, can afford to offer real schooling to the Dominican players, why can’t everybody else? In their novel approach, the Pirates have partnered with a local education provider, and all players are required to be in the classroom for four hours a day, five days a week. In total, the Pirates’ education initiative cost them $75,000 this year. That’s a rounding error, even for Pittsburgh. Of the 31 prospects in the academy during this school year, 29 passed their current grade level. Five kids are expected to earn high school diplomas.

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Is it baseball’s duty to offset the failures of the Dominican government, which spends only 2% of GDP on education, one of the worst rates in the world? After all, baseball is a business, not a social agency. Surprisingly enough, Alderson, a Harvard Law School graduate who built the dominant Oakland Athletics teams of the late 1980s, talks about expanding baseball’s social role. He is not downplaying expectations one bit. “We need to provide educational opportunities for players who have signed contracts, who are in these Major League Baseball academies,” Alderson says. “We also have to figure out a way to provide similar opportunities to kids before they sign their contracts.”

Right off the bat, Alderson can mandate that every team require its signed prospects to attend formal classes. In sports, only a numbskull would copycat a team that has suffered 17 straight losing seasons, as have the Pirates. But in the D.R., teams should be more like them.

Dominican Draft Dodging
Alderson has already taken steps to control the seedier aspects of the Dominican system. Beginning this year, MLB’s Santo Domingo office fingerprinted and drug-tested the top 40 unsigned prospects. (According to a Dominican baseball source, about one-third of them tested positive for steroids.) This pilot program will include more players next year. Baseball is also starting antidoping education for unsigned prospects.

Most buscones have no objections to these measures. What really rankles them is the possibility of an international draft, in which players’ negotiation rights would be assigned to teams, not put up for bid. Right now, Dominican baseball is a free-market enterprise; players can be signed by any team, at the highest price they can get, and the trainer-agents command a hefty negotiation fee. For prospects in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, a single team acquires the rights to them in a draft in which clubs make selections in a set order, with the most prized prospects taken off the board first.

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The buscones’ fear is that if a single team acquires a Dominican player, that team has all the leverage. In the U.S., a top high school prospect can go to college if he gets a lowball offer from the team that drafted him and re-enter the draft later. Dominican prospects don’t hold that negotiating card. “Our kids don’t go to school,” says Astin Jacobo, a trainer from San Pedro de Macorís. “Our kids don’t go to college. We don’t want to fall into that trap.”

That trap is the fate of Puerto Rico. After the U.S. commonwealth became subject to the draft in the 1989, the number of Puerto Rican signees remained flat, while those in the D.R. skyrocketed. Dominican stakeholders worry that a draft would reduce both the number of players signed and their bonuses, giving young Dominicans less incentive to chase a baseball career. “The factories would be shut down,” says Papiro, the buscón from Santo Domingo.

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That’s exactly the point, argue draft proponents. Without buscones shopping prospects to the highest bidder, a draft would curb their influence. Baseball could also require that Dominican players graduate from high school to qualify for the draft, as it essentially does for Americans. Such a rule would spike school attendance across the island and perhaps force the government to improve education.

Selig has publicly expressed his support for the international draft. The issue stirs such passions that when Alderson first arrived in the D.R. in April, buscones staged a heated protest outside his hotel. Alderson has repeatedly insisted that he is not in the country to enforce a draft, though he won’t rule out the possibility.

Alderson has reached out to some of the top buscones, but Dominicans are still chafing at his meddling. “They are imposing themselves instead of coming down to negotiate,” says Jacobo, who is not ready to profess full trust in Alderson. “We are the ones making the kids, taking them and selling them. We have to have a say in the decisionmaking … They’re still the sheriff.”

Alderson recognizes the sensitivity of the situation and understands the resistance. But he’s not apologizing. “This is an American company, this is an American institution functioning in this country, and there’s no reason why someone like myself shouldn’t be here,” he says. And his intentions are clear. “People are making a lot of money based on a system that is flawed,” he says. “And they don’t want to see change, it’s as simple as that. From my point of view, change is coming. Whether they accept it or not.”

Forgotten off the Field
Wander onto the side of almost any road in the D.R., and you’ll understand why reform is urgent. There you’re sure to bump into a common Dominican meme: the washed-up baseball player struggling to get by. Edgar Arias, for example, is hanging around the province of San Cristóbal one wet morning, mere minutes from the palatial Padres academy, with too little to do. Arias spent some time in the Los Angeles Angels camp two years ago, but he never got his signing bonus — he said he was going to get $70,000 — because the team found out he faked his identity. Arias, who says he stopped school in the 11th grade, claims a trainer told him to lie about his age so that he could secure a bigger bonus. “He was messing with my head,” says Arias, 22.

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Now Arias lives in a shanty he shares with seven other people. And like so many former players, he’s cycling back into the same system that spit him out. Arias wants to be a buscón because that’s where the money is. His players practice hitting in a trash-strewn space near his house, amid the wandering pigs, abandoned sneakers and empty bottles of booze. They pound stringy balls, many absent their cowhide cover, into a tattered net tied to a tree. They lift weights, which are nothing more than cement poured into tin cans, in a gutted-out space that feels like a dungeon.

If former players aren’t hanging on as trainers, many take jobs as moped drivers or handymen. David Toledo, 21, left school after the 11th grade to concentrate on baseball but was never signed by a team. Now he says he goes weeks, if not months, between painting jobs, while still living in an area where little children roam naked. “My whole world came down,” Toledo says about the moment he realized he wouldn’t make it. When asked if baseball left him with anything, his mother is quick to chime in. “Nada. Nada. Nada,” she says.

“We see so many former baseball players who are just disenfranchised with life,” says Gary Hale, an American-born missionary who has started a school and baseball program in San Pedro de Macorís. “Even if they have a high school degree, they don’t want to continue. They carry around a lot of guilt.” While Hale is leaving the house of Nestor Fernandez, 31, the nephew of ex-major leaguer Tony Fernandez and a former farmhand of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Fernandez asks Hale to pray for him. He needs a job.

Not every former player feels pangs of regret. Francisco Hernandez, a truck driver from San Pedro de Macorís who spent over two years in the Pittsburgh Pirates academy in the late 1990s, has an eighth-grade education. “It’s good to study,” says Hernandez, 31, who says he took steroids. “But here there’s no other option besides baseball to gain something quickly.” Hernandez never made it out of the D.R., yet he won’t dwell on any baseball failures. “Now my job is to prepare the best shortstop in the world,” says Hernandez, “and that’s my son.” The boy is one.

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