The Eastern Stars (28 page)

In May 2008 the White Sox fired their director of player personnel, David Wilder, and two Dominican scouts, Victor Mateo and Domingo Toribio, charging that they had conspired with
buscones
to pressure prospects into paying them a part of their signing bonuses. The White Sox turned the case over to Major League Baseball, which quickly turned it over to the FBI. Before any results of the investigation were made public, it became apparent that such corruption was not a uniquely White Sox problem. It was not clear exactly how they managed to get the prospects’ money, but the scam was clearly based on how easily intimidated the desperately poor are. It could have all been stopped by the prospects or their families speaking up, but few wanted to make trouble because it could result in a release. It could not be done without the knowledge of the prospect, who is paid directly by Major League Baseball. Yet players were not coming forward to lodge complaints.

A scout could approach a
buscón
and tell him an amount that he could get his boy, and suggest he talk the family into taking less so he and the scout could share the extra. The
buscón
, often trusted and liked by the young prospect, went to the family and told them that he could get a larger bonus if he was willing to leave a cut for the scout. Or he might tell them that they had to pay a cut or there wouldn’t be any deal. Desperate for the deal, the family usually did what they were told. No matter how big a bite they lost, they would be getting more money than they had ever seen, with the possibility of even greater paychecks in a few years.

Buscón
Astin Jacobo said, “I’ve been around this sport all my life. Yes, there are some bad guys in baseball, but there are a lot more on top than on the bottom. Yes, sometimes a scout comes up to me with a deal, but I’ve got my father’s name to protect and my son who is trying to be a ballplayer. But this is not the first time I’ve seen shit in baseball. Scouts came up to you, the old-timers, and they say, ‘Listen, I like the kid, but he needs to be seventeen, not twenty. Here is five hundred pesos.’ They used to do that a lot—not all the time, but a lot.”

Because of the increased value of a younger player, false birth certificates were a common occurrence. In 2003, Alfonso Soriano told Yankees general manager Brian Cashman that he was not born on January 7, 1978, as stated when they signed him, but in 1976. Often false identity papers do not even have the correct name. Adriano Rosario from San Pedro, age nineteen, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher who signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002 for a $400,000 bonus, was actually Ramón Antonio Peña Paulino, age twenty-two. Rafael Pérez, manager for Major League Baseball’s Latin American office in Santo Domingo, was quoted as saying that they should have been more suspicious because everyone called Adriano “Tony.” Rosario later claimed that he perpetrated the fraud under pressure from Rafael Mena, a well-known scout in San Pedro. As Astin said, it was often the scout who pushed for a changed age. Then the scout sometimes demanded part of the player’s bonus to keep from exposing the fraud. It was not difficult to handle a frightened teenager trying to negotiate a life-changing deal.

False papers were not only lowering ages to make players more valuable but also raising ages to make players eligible. A boy named Adrián Beltré from Santo Domingo worked at the Dodgers’ academy, where scout Ralph Avila and others spotted his remarkable speed and strong arm. In 1994 the Dodgers signed him with a $23,000 signing bonus—a good bonus for that time, considering that the Dodgers were not competing for him. In 1999, with Beltré now playing third base for the Dodgers, Major League Baseball—which was investigating illegal signings in the Dominican Republic—discovered that Beltré had been only fifteen years old when he signed. The Dodgers were fined $50,000 and banned from scouting, signing, or running an academy in the Dominican Republic for one year, although they did find loopholes to keep the academy open. Two months later, in February 2000, the Braves were fined $100,000 and banned from the Dominican Republic for six months for having signed shortstop Wilson Betemit when he had not yet turned fifteen. Pitcher Ricardo Aramboles was illegally signed by the Florida Marlins when he was still fourteen years old. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, visas came under closer scrutiny and more than three hundred cases of age fraud were found.

One of San Pedro’s ugliest baseball scandals came in 1997, when a scout, Luis Rosa, who worked in San Pedro, was arrested not only for illegally taking cuts from players’ bonuses but also for demanding sex from fifteen young prospects at the Giants’ San Pedro training camp by Porvenir. The initial complaint was filed by a twenty-year-old right-handed pitcher, Yan Carlos Ravelo, who said, “Luis Rosa took advantage of our poverty and our desperation for an American visa to make us his slaves.”

Luis Rosa was not a small-time scout. He had signed Ozzie Guillén, Roberto and Sandy Alomar, Juan González, Iván Rodríguez, and many other Dominican major leaguers. In a country where homosexuality was usually an unspoken taboo, this was a messy case written about in
The New York Times
and other foreign newspapers. While Rosa maintained his innocence, the case was a tremendous embarrassment involving some of the biggest names in Dominican baseball. Rosa had been working for the San Francisco Giants, a pioneering team in introducing Dominican players to Major League Baseball: Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers had starred for the Giants. Juan Marichal had to deal with the case because he was now the Dominican government’s secretary of sports and recreation. Joaquín Andújar testified on behalf of the boys.

 

B
y 2008 the steroid scandal was full-blown and there seemed little escaping it—not in the Dominican Republic, not even in San Pedro de Macorís. What was most awkward for San Pedro and Dominican baseball in general was that one of the leading arguments that Sammy Sosa was a steroid user was the fact that he had been so small when he signed and then he became such a large burly man. This was true of so many Dominican players. Was it really a sign of steroid use?

“Everybody who comes to America to play this game in the minors is always skinny,” Sosa argued. “When they get to the major leagues they start eating good and doing things better. If you eat better and work out better you are supposed to gain some weight.” He said that he filled out when he got to Texas because he was eating so much better. “What’d he eat,” quipped Rick Reilly, “Fort Worth?”

It was a disturbingly familiar story in San Pedro, and became even more embarrassing once it was revealed that Sosa really had built himself up with steroids.

In the Dominican Republic, steroids are sold cheaply and without prescription in most pharmacies. Also, in the Dominican Republic there are many talented young players whose chances of getting into the millionaire club are impeded by the slightness of their builds. Add the fact that most of these youths had an entire family counting on them, and this was a scenario for steroid abuse. In the year 2000, a
New York Times
reporter went into a dozen pharmacies—some in San Pedro and some in Santo Domingo—and found only two that were not willing to sell some version of testosterone without a prescription. This is not surprising, since there is very little effort to control the sale of pharmaceuticals in the Dominican Republic. In fact, investigations of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball have found that the drugs are often obtained in the Dominican Republic. Major-league players often talk among themselves about how those who go down to the Dominican Republic to play winter ball gain easy access to steroids. In 2009, when New York-born infielder Alex Rodriguez confessed to having used steroids, he said he obtained them from his cousin in the Dominican Republic. In San Pedro the most easily obtainable steroids are ones designed to be used by veterinarians on animals, usually horses.

Major League Baseball responded in 2004 by testing in the academies. That year eleven percent of the signed players in the Dominican academies tested positive. Clearly the practice was widespread. Talks on the serious health risks involved in using these drugs became a standard part of the curriculum in the academies. Also, prospects understood that they would be tested when they went to the academies and that steroid use would be exposed, putting their careers at risk. Test results after 2004 showed the practice steadily declining and leveling off in 2007 and 2008 to slightly more than three percent of signed players testing positive for steroid use.

 

M
acorisanos and Dominicans have reason to worry. The American press eagerly picks up any whiff of such scandals, because in America the idea that there is something less than proper about all these foreign and wild “Latins” getting into baseball has considerable resonance.
Foreign
is generally not a positive adjective in the United States. In 1987 pitcher Kevin Gross got caught illegally creating an odd movement in his pitch by means of a sticky substance that he hid in his glove. Accused of slipping a foreign substance on the ball, he denied the charge by protesting, “Everything I used on it is from the good old U.S.A.”

The fact that more and more players are not from the good old U.S.A. is not popular in America. This author wrote a cover story in
Parade
magazine in July 2007 about baseball in San Pedro de Macorís and the magazine received more than one hundred letters from readers. Most complained that there were too many foreigners, too many Latins, or too many Dominicans in baseball. Baseball, after all, was an American sport and the top players should be American. In the nineteenth century, the great American poet Walt Whitman, definer of things American, called baseball “America’s game,” said it had “the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere,” and even compared it in significance to the Constitution. While Major League Baseball is seeking to internationalize the game, many Americans want to keep it uniquely American.

Much of the criticism comes from African-Americans. It is undeniable that the number of black players has declined precipitously just as the number of Latino players, the majority of whom are Dominican, has risen. After Jackie Robinson, the number of African-American players steadily climbed until 1975, when it reached twenty-five percent: one in four major leaguers. By 2005, black Americans represented only 9.5 percent of major-league players. At the same time, almost one in three major leaguers was foreign born. That number seemed certain to rise. Dominicans alone made up about a quarter of all minor leaguers.

Not only fans but some African-American players have been outspoken about this, most notably the great hitter Gary Sheffield. Sheffield claimed that Major League Baseball was favoring Latin players because they could be acquired more cheaply and were easier to control. “Where I’m from, you can’t control us,” said Sheffield. “You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that’s a person that you’re going to talk to with respect, you’re going to talk to like a man.”

That Latinos are easy to control would come as a revelation to anyone who had worked with George Bell or Joaquín Andújar. But it was true that Dominican ballplayers came to the U.S. with a terror of being released and shipped back to the cane fields. Ironically this was the exact same logic that had made the American sugar companies prefer imported
cocolos
, thinking that fear of being shipped back would make them easier to control than Dominican laborers. As for getting Latin players more cheaply, even Dominicans, including Sammy Sosa and Manny Alexander, publicly acknowleged—complained—that drafted American rookies got more money than Dominican prospects. That was certainly true of Sosa and Alexander. But top Dominican prospects in the twenty-first century were landing signing bonuses that strongly suggested that baseball’s interest in Dominican players was not about getting them cheaply.

A careful study of the evidence suggests that Major League Baseball is looking abroad for talent because it is faced with declining interest in the U.S. When asking what has happened to African-American baseball players, it should not be ignored that nearly eighty percent of players in the National Basketball Association are black, as are two-thirds of the players in the National Football League. Major League Baseball has made a considerable effort to attract African-Americans, but without much result. In black neighborhoods around America, baseball programs are closing down because of a lack of participation.

No one is certain why this is happening. It is sometimes suggested that it is because the route to a high-paying position is considerably faster for an NFL or NBA player than for a professional baseball player. Football and basketball do not have minor leagues. They bring their players up through college programs, and college stars seamlessly move to being high-paid professionals without putting in a few low-paying and humbling years in the minors.

But there is a broader problem. Americans in general are losing interest in baseball. The fans are getting older and older, and young people are dramatically less interested. Hundreds of Little League programs have closed.

Fred Cambria, a former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who has coached major-league and college players and often runs clinics for urban boys wanting to develop baseball skills, said, “I see the Latino player being dominant for the upcoming years. They are great athletes, they work hard from an early age.” He was not saying that African-Americans would not work hard but that they were poor people who found more economic incentive in other sports. “There’s no scholarships for baseball players in colleges, so they go to the revenue sports—football and basketball,” he explained. “You get a small amount of scholarship money and you have to divide it up, and a black kid needs a full ride. So now there are not enough heroes for them to look up to in baseball.”

Cambria sees the urban programs struggling. Revitalizing Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) was supposed to develop urban baseball players. “RBI is trying to get African-Americans to play, and it’s very very difficult. Inner city programs are closing,” he said. But it is not a problem only with African-Americans: Americans in general seem to be losing interest in baseball. Cambria lives in the largely white, middle-class Long Island town of Northport, where, he said, “ninety percent of the kids play soccer or lacrosse and the baseball diamonds are empty.”