The Eastern Stars (21 page)

The idea was not originally Dominican. After the draft was established in the U.S., men known as bird dogs began earning a living by training promising youth for the draft. In the Dominican Republic they became known as
buscones
, from the Spanish verb
buscar
, to look for. A
buscón
looked for promising youth, sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and worked with them every day for years, feeding them, training them, teaching them what they needed to know until they were ready, then got them a major-league tryout. When one of their boys signed, they got a percentage of the bonus. The percentage was not fixed: it was typically a quarter and sometimes as much as a half of the bonus.

Not only was there the possibility of earning more money as a
buscón
than a scout, but to the way of thinking of some scouts,
buscones
were having all the fun. In the days of Avila and Guerrero, a scout scoured the wild Dominican countryside, sometimes sleeping in a jeep because there were no hotels. Now someone was leading them to prospects. The
buscones
were the ones who got to
buscar.

One of the first
buscones
in San Pedro plowed up the garden in front of his house to use as a training field. Soon they were occupying bigger fields and parks, renting or buying spaces. Bringing in millions a year, signing bonuses had become the biggest business in San Pedro.

Apollinaire Batista, like many Consuelo natives, was the son of a Haitian cane worker. Batista was a
buscón
. He supplied all his own equipment, trained teenagers until they were ready to be seen by major-league scouts, and arranged tryouts. If they signed, he said, he took five percent of the bonus, which was an unusually small cut. After the player was signed he found a new prospect, so that he was always working with a small group. He liked to get them at the age of twelve so that he had four years to develop them and they could be ready the moment they were old enough. The younger a prospect, the more money he fetched. So
buscones
wanted to present all their players as young as possible. But they also had to make sure they were ready, because a second or third tryout gets harder to arrange. Batista had players who were not ready until the age of twenty, which meant a significantly smaller bonus. “You can’t show them until they are ready,” he pointed out, shrugging.

The boys worked out in the morning and went to school in the afternoon. Batista’s goal was to get every boy that he took on signed to a major-league organization. In his best year he got five boys signed. Francisco de los Santos, a seventeen-year-old right-handed pitcher who threw faster than 90 miles per hour and also had a good changeup and several breaking balls, was signed by the Mets in 2008. His bonus was $25,000, which was a considerable amount of money in Consuelo, even though by 2008, the year of the $4.8 million pitcher, $25,000 indicated only a modicum of excitement on the part of the Mets. Bartolo Nicolas, a young outfielder, signed with the Blue Jays for $20,000. Once those two were signed, Batista had another seven ready to show to scouts.

One of the reasons scouts have so many fields to look at in San Pedro is that there are so many
buscones
. Like
cocolo
,
buscón
is a word that may or may not be pejorative, depending on who says it and how. Astin Jacobo, Jr., proud of his late father’s name, did not like to be called a
buscón
. He said the word carried the connotation of “hustler,” which he insisted he was not. He took thirty percent of bonuses, which was by no means the highest percentage but was among the higher ones. On the other hand, he had one of the better-equipped programs.

“Thirty percent sounds like a lot to an American,” Jacobo said in his New York English. “But I have to provide clothing, schooling, food, housing, a woman to cook them food four times a day, and a staff of eight. I have $7,000 a month overhead, plus balls and bats. I lose four balls a day: they get hit out to the street and kids grab them.

“It costs me between 350,000 and 450,000 pesos in two and a half years to get a player signed,” he added. But those pesos would only be about $14,000 in the U.S., and while a drafted American player does not come with all the nutritional, medical, educational, and developmental issues of a Dominican player, because of the difference in economies, it still costs Major League Baseball considerably more to develop a player in the U.S.

For Jacobo, there was no better place in the world to develop baseball players than his father’s hometown. “I’ve been all over Latin America. This is the best town I have ever seen for baseball, because we have every kind of player here. You could come by a field on a Saturday morning and you might see a few major leaguers out playing with sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.”

 

T
he academies were the logical outgrowth of Rafael Avila’s backyard operation in the 1970s. But by the twenty-first century they had become sprawling, sophisticated operations. Every major-league franchise operated an academy. Most of them were in the southeast, either in San Pedro; La Romana, a few miles to the east; Boca Chica, a few miles to the west; or a few miles farther west toward the capital. An academy was a place where a major-league organization could feed, train, and educate Dominican prospects, addressing all their special needs at Dominican costs, rather than those of housing, feeding, and preparing them in the United States. That higher cost of operating in the States was why clubs did not hesitate to give up on their investments and release players who were not living up to their expectations before sending them up to the States. The Dominican Summer League was established as a kind of pre- Rookie League—a last proving ground before paying to bring prospects to the United States.

An academy also gave an organization a scouting base in the Dominican Republic. In the 1970s and 1980s it became apparent that the teams that had operations in the country were getting most of the best Dominican talent.

But the other purpose of academies was to serve as holding tanks while Dominican players waited for their visas, a safe place where the teenagers’ sleeping, eating, and other habits could be controlled.

To many Americans, especially New Yorkers, it seems that Dominicans can easily get visas to the U.S., because so many have. The Dominican Republic, with an estimated total population of ten million, has sent more immigrants to the United States than any other Latin American country except Mexico, with an estimated population of 103 million. But it is not easy to get a visa, especially for poor people. The U.S. Embassy requires a $100 fee just to have an appointment to discuss a tourist visa, and the majority of Dominicans do not have the $100.

Major League Baseball generally gets its players a special visa for people who have proven to be exceptional in their field. But newly signed prospects are brought in as temporary seasonal laborers, like farmworkers, whose visas expire at the end of the season. To get these visas, it has to be established that the worker is not taking a job away from an American worker. The U.S. government limits the number of such visas. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, these visas became even harder to get. Until the player got his visa, he was kept at an academy, where his life and training could be carefully regulated and he could be further screened. Obviously, an organization is not likely to release a pitcher with a $4 million bonus or even one who received $500,000. But a few $20,000 or even $50,000 players got weeded out for visa problems.

These boys at the academies, whose future seemed so bright when they received their bonuses only weeks before, were under tremendous pressure. The usual practice when releasing players, whether in the Dominican Republic or in the minor-league system in the U.S., was to simply inform them that they were released without giving any explanation. Sometimes they were released for what was deemed “bad behavior.” What would happen today to a Dominican Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, or Ted Williams, all famous in their day for bad behavior? If the Dominican player was released in the U.S., he would be given a return ticket to Santo Domingo. With the termination of the job, the temporary work visa expired.

 

E
xactly what the ball clubs were looking for was always a little mysterious. The scouts, the academies, the organizations, were looking for someone who would make a great Major League Baseball player. When considering a sixteen-year-old, however, this usually required some guesswork.

Traditionally, what everyone in baseball wants are the “five-tool players.” Baseball requires an unusually varied list of skills, and it is extremely rare to find someone who does everything well. Only a handful of major-league stars have been five-tool players. Playing ability has been reduced to five basic tools: a good throwing arm, speed at running, skill in fielding, the power to hit home runs, and the ability to hit consistently, which is measured by batting average.

Dario Paulino, who grew up in San Pedro and in 2007 became the coordinator of the Atlanta Braves’ academy in San Pedro, said, “That’s what we look for in every player: a five-tool player.”

But there were a lot of less tangible things that scouts and trainers wanted to see. Dany Santana said, “The first thing I look for is . . .” and he pointed at his head. He quoted a favorite Eddy Toledo saying:
“No puede pensar, no puede jugar”—
If you can’t think, you can’t play. “If you are young and smart, you can improve quickly,” Santana noted. Coming from a stable home with some education came to be considered an important asset for Dominicans, even though many great Dominican players hadn’t come from such homes. The organizations wanted boys who could learn how to speak English and get along in the United States.

Dominicans, especially Macorisanos, generally lived their lives confined to a small world. They didn’t travel and, despite the enormous number of both local and national newspapers, knew little about what went on in the outside world. During World War II, it was said that the average Dominican knew almost nothing about the war. Most sixteen-year-old Macorisanos had seldom left San Pedro. They may have gone a few miles east to La Romana or north to Hato Mayor, both agricultural areas. If they were signed by an organization with an academy a few miles east in Boca Chica or a little farther in Santo Domingo, that alone was a huge adventure.

Rafael Vásquez said, “I look for a good arm, how he runs, how he talks to other people. Is he a good guy with a good family?”

Asked what he looked for, Eddy Toledo said, “Athleticism and a passion for the game. It’s hard to find now. In the past, people loved the game more than now. Kids used to play baseball because they loved the game. Now the top priority is to be rich and famous, and not because of a passion in their hearts.”

As bonuses went up, the teams grew more cautious. They used to simply pay what the scout recommended. Then they started sending someone to take a look and decide if the player merited the investment. There was a growing feeling that the amount of money paid was adversely affecting the players.

Toledo did not like big bonuses. As of 2009, the biggest bonus he ever got was $43,000. He said, “If you give a poor kid $300,000, this is the first rock in the way of his development. He’s not hungry anymore. I am very worried about giving kids big money, because they don’t try hard anymore.”

But this was inevitable as the power of Major League Baseball to change a Dominican life became ever more dramatic. Bonny Castillo, known as Manny in the U.S. when he played Major League Baseball in the early 1980s, coached newly signed prospects for Tampa Bay in the Dominican Republic. He said, “When I was playing, $15,000 was my best-paid year. I make more money now as a coach than I ever made as a player. The minimum wage got to $35,000 and now it is $400,000. If you make $400,000, you come home a rich man if you only play four or five seasons. You get in the big league, you’ve got it made.”

Toledo’s example of what he liked was signing José Reyes for the Mets. Reyes, who exuded a love of baseball in the way he played, got a $13,000 signing bonus. “José Reyes was a special case,” said Toledo. “I signed him in Santiago at a restaurant lunch with his family and friends. When he left and walked toward the parking lot, I said to someone, ‘Look at that. There’s a specialness you can see. It’s like a halo.’”

But Toledo admitted that he did not often see halos. So he looked for how easily the player moved to see if he was a natural athlete, and he looked at the kind of body the boy had and imagined what it could look like with the addition of protein and conditioning. If it was a pitcher, he looked for long arms, big hands, and broad shoulders. He pointed at a tall, thin young pitcher throwing on the mound with long arms and legs. “He’s got a perfect body,” he observed. “A lot of room to fill out.” And then he shouted with great enthusiasm, “That kid could tie his shoes standing up!”

He and a lot of others also looked for aggression—aggressive pitchers and aggressive batters. Eddy Toledo recalled spotting Mets superstar pitcher Dwight Gooden as a boy: “I said, ‘He’s Bob Gibson. He competes, the aggression is there. His body is just not finished.’ ”

José Serra, scout and Latin American supervisor for the Cubs, said, “The secret of scouting is that, more than anything, he has to be a kid who wants to be something special.” The Cubs’ academy was in a huge complex out in the fields on a dirt road off the highway between San Pedro and Boca Chica. The complex housed academies with dormitories, workout rooms, staffed dining rooms, and other facilities for four different major-league teams, and was expanding in the hopes of drawing one or two more. As the scouting became more intense, success depended less on secrecy and more on outbidding competitors, and to adjust to this new reality, the organizations were increasingly clustering together in these large multiteam complexes rather than hiding away in small individual camps in the fields. This particular complex was built by former ballplayers, including Junior Noboa, a Dominican from Azua in the desertlands of the southwest, the poorest part of the Dominican Republic. Noboa, in an unspectacular eight years on various major-league teams, hit only one home run and never commanded huge paychecks. But he understood that for very little money he could buy a plot of undeveloped tropical brushland, clear it, build a few simple concrete buildings, landscape some baseball diamonds, and rent it for handsome prices to major-league organizations.