By JARED HOPKINS
By JARED HOPKINS
Tribune News Service
SAN PEDRO de MACORIS, Dominican Republic — Winding through the dusty and chaotic streets crammed with honking cars and buzzing scooters, you’d never know this coastal city is a baseball mecca.
But past the rows of one-room concrete buildings with peeling paint, and beyond the roads littered with garbage and stray dogs, a sprawling park emerged. Kids there scrambled around the ragged fields, their shouts in Spanish piercing the afternoon heat. Bats cracked and balls thudded into leather gloves.
Among the dozens of young ballplayers was Richard Paulino, 16, who stood along the first-base line, a few feet from what used to be a full backstop but had been whittled into a short stub of a fence. Muscular and a bit taller than his teammates, Paulino just finished shagging fly balls in the outfield.
“I want to play in the major leagues, of course,” he said, his face curving into a smile to show braces. “I am passionate about the game. I am focused.”
Can Paulino reach his goal? He’s certainly in the right country to get there.
The Dominican Republic delivers more talent to the major leagues than any other country besides the United States. Kids here are four times more likely than their American counterparts to reach the major leagues. Dominicans make up between 25 and 40 percent of minor leaguers.
“It’s the second-most-prolific country of baseball talent in the world,” said Kim Ng, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president in charge of international operations. “The Dominican’s tremendously important and that’s why we just opened a brand-new office down there.”
The sport thrives here because of the talent — kids regularly drop out of school to play — and the environment that hastens its development. Money pumps in from the United States, thanks to major league teams and private investors who open academies. And success is still tied to the reluctant, rocky relationship between MLB and a network of independent Dominican scouts who train players, known locally as buscones.
“They depend on each other for survival and they depend on each other to flourish,” said Alan Klein, a sociology professor at Northeastern University who has written books on Dominican baseball. “So, who’s controlling the game? There’s no clear answer. It’s a new system.”
Baseball also remains a leading opportunity for kids to escape a country where more than a third live below the poverty line. Likewise, its economy stretches to jobs far beyond the ballfields: landscapers who care for fields; cooks and housekeepers; even real estate agents teams hire to find prospects housing.
Don’t expect the growth to stop soon with the money at stake. MLB’s 20 players on the country’s last World Baseball Classic team were paid a combined $105 million in MLB salaries. All major league clubs operate year-round pristine academies to mold prospects. Legions of scouts are deployed to find them.
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In 2013, for instance, the Cubs opened the nation’s largest training facility, a glamorous 50 acre-complex with three fields, a workout room, dormitories and other perks often out of reach for most in the country.
Many kids — like Paulino — train at independent academies six days a week and receive instruction ranging from how to steal a base properly to the importance of shaking hands after games.
“We have to be on and on and on and on with these kids,” said Astin Jacobo Jr., a respected buscone who has sent dozens of kids to the big leagues since his academy opened in 2001. “We want them to succeed. We don’t want the kids just to sign.”
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The growth of Dominican baseball reflects the diverse demographics of foreigners playing in the United States. The Latino player population in the big leagues has steadily increased to reach about 27 percent, according to the most recent statistics from the Society for American Baseball Research.
By 2013, there were 510 Dominican player signings, an increase from 432 a decade before, according to MLB. The combined bonuses for player signings jumped from $13.7 million to $61.5 million during that same time period.
But numbers alone don’t paint the complete picture of baseball’s dominance in the Dominican.
Many here insist there are more opportunities to make it as a ballplayer. They cite player showcases and the plethora of academies who host them; MLB officials using the Internet to monitor player progress; and pro leagues that replaced the amateurs.
“It’s a lot easier than when I used to play,” said ex-Cub Moises Alou, now the general manager of a Dominican Winter League team. “Everybody now plays baseball. There’s a lot of programs and tryouts and there’s a lot of teams competing to sign the best players available. Everyone wants to be the next Pedro Martinez and the next Sammy Sosa.”
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The presence of MLB facilities is a crescendo from more than 30 years ago. The newest of these glittery churches rival their stadiums in the United States and boast classrooms, weight rooms and the thickest grass in the Dominican.
“The housing itself is bigger, more modern,” said Class A St. Lucie Mets managers Luis Rojas, a Dominican native who visits regularly. “It helps even more with the player, as far as they learn baseball they also develop as human beings. Our education is not as high. Some guys don’t finish high school.”
Despite the growth, MLB continues to recover from years of scandal in the Dominican. Age and identity fraud, performance-enhancing drugs and bonus-skimming were regular headlines. In recent years, three White Sox employees went to federal prison in relation to kickbacks from players’ bonuses and contracts.
To clean up the sport, MLB launched a task force about a decade back. Some recommendations were enacted, but the much-publicized idea for an international draft was shot down after Jacobo led a protest that included a petition from hundreds of pro players.
In recent years, Ng said, MLB has continued to reorganize its Dominican office, begun hosting showcases for players, and started registering prospects.
“It has gotten more organized, but I think again, given the inherent issues there, it’s not solved by any stretch,” Ng said.
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No change in the Dominican, however, has perhaps drawn more attention than the limit placed on international signings.
MLB’s new labor agreement, from 2012, created a bonus pool that limited what teams could spend on international free agents. Amounts are set on a sliding scale based on a team’s previous season’s record. Exceeding the amount leads to penalties, complicating the wooing of coveted prospects. The intention was similar to revenue-sharing and designed to help small-market franchises.
(The Cubs were penalized for exceeding their limit in 2013; they’re restricted to signing players for no more than $250,000 until July 2.)
Dominicans remain opposed to the cap, arguing it means players are signed below market value and forces teams to sign fewer players. Teams spending conservatively now search for younger players, meaning buscones seek younger kids.
Alfredo Arias, who owns an independent academy, ticked off a half-dozen players who signed for six figures since he first opened in 2009.
“This year I didn’t sign too many players,” he said, one afternoon after wrapping up a showcase of 30 of the players he trains.
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The world of buscones has grown up from when they unearthed kids in remote villages, and some have opened academies or run programs at parks. They employ handlers to find players for them and represent kids in negotiations with teams.
But they still furnish training, meals and a place to live in return for about 30 percent of the player’s signing bonus. In the past decade, some fell to scandal amid accusations of skimming money from players and investigations by MLB. They were viewed — and still are, at least in America — as problematic gold-diggers and whose fees remain high. American agents, critics point out, receive only 5 percent of their clients’ salaries.
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In the Dominican, buscones are viewed positively, a natural partner for a kid meeting his goal of getting to the big leagues. They still operate with few rules and free of MLB regulation. Now MLB relies on them and the rest of the Dominican baseball network because they are the gatekeepers to the talent.
Arias said darker times are behind the country but stressed caution.
“They feel they created this million-dollar signing bonus. So, yeah they’ll always be around,” he said. “The thing about baseball is that Major League Baseball doesn’t have a complete handle on all these bad things.”
Pedro Carrom, who runs the program with Paulino, said he provides a type of education for the kids.
“In case one day they can play professional, good, they can make some money,” he said in Spanish. “If they don’t, well, I’ve done something good for them in their life.”
They can sign at 16, an age that tends to determine their futures.
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“When they are 22, 23 years old, nobody will sign them,” said Jose Serra, 41, the Cubs’ director of Dominican operations. “They get to that age without signing because they don’t have any ability.”
In fact, most kids throwing the ball around Boca Chica or San Cristobal won’t even leave the country, let alone reach professional baseball in the United States.
But ballplayers who go unsigned — plenty get six-figure deals and flame out — but weren’t born into middle or upper classes likely won’t find decent jobs in the Dominican economy, said Adrian Burgos, a University of Illinois at Champaign professor who studies baseball in Latin America. So parents risk a son’s childhood with baseball instead of going to school — partly because buscones are paying the bills.
“It’s a system that’s designed to exploit the big league dreams of young Dominican boys and their families,” he said. “The vast majority don’t make it.”
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On a recent sticky, sunny afternoon, thousands of people packed into Estadio Tetelo Vargas, bringing the bleak, Soviet-style concrete stadium in San Pedro nearly to its 10,000-person capacity.
Kids wearing local teams’ uniforms shouted in Spanish as they clamored for better views. Some climbed over the stadium’s walls and perched atop the dugout to watch. Up in the air-conditioned press box, scouts from pro teams checked their phones in between glances at the field.
But fans were less interested in which teams were playing than the mere chance to watch baseball.
“In the Dominican, there’s not a lot of ways for you to go in life,” said Serra, who doubled as general manager for one of the teams about to play. “Baseball is life.”
Just before the first pitch, Richard Paulino walked onto the concourse with some friends, making his way through the crowd. He passed the girls selling popcorn out of a plastic garbage tub and the woman selling soda from a shoebox.
He was asked by a reporter if he was going to take the field.
He smiled. “Someday.”