Fraudulent Baseball Scout Case in DR Shows Need For Both MLB And Local Oversight

I’m not sure how effective Sandy Alderson was as Bud Selig’s right hand man tasked with weeding out corruption in MLB’s Dominican Republic baseball academies. It didn’t seem like Alderson had the job for very long before jumping at the GM job of the New York Mets. Perhaps he wrote a comprehensive report on all of his findings, and recommendations for fixing the problem of DR baseball scouts taking advantage of young, disadvantaged players and their families.

I’m sure Alderson was thorough in his work since he is an ex-Marine and Harvard Law grad. I’m willing to bet the one BIG recommendation to MLB teams was pretty simple: Be Careful With Whom You Do Business. It seems obvious, but people not doing due diligence on their potential business partners happens so often in life that we have to pay other people large sums of money to remind us that. To that end, it’s not like MLB has had much incentive or motivation to do their due diligence in the DR until this problem was made public.

Of course, we also must remember that this is not all of MLB’s problem to fix. Which is why it was refreshing to hear that it was the DR authorities who finally arrested and pressed charges against Victor Baez (pictured above courtesy of NY Daily News), the former DR baseball scout accused of fraud. This news signaled that the DR government is officially taking the problem seriously of one of their citizens screwing over another one of their citizens over the hopes and dreams of playing baseball.

This problem is not limited to the Dominican Republic, nor is it limited to the sport of baseball. It happens to some degree or another in every country and in every sport. What’s troubling about the Dominican Republic is that it produces the second most amount of talent for MLB next to the United States, and MLB teams have been scouting and running academies in the DR for at least the last 3 decades.

So is this problem of fraud and corruption a recurring one, or has it finally been addressed and solved? That’s a real important point to consider as MLB goes around the world and “colonizes” other developing baseball talent pools.

If you are a country with a developing baseball talent pool, you should assume that MLB can only do so much to police itself at this point. There are country baseball federations who currently tightly regulate the players being signed out of their “programs”, and in some cases these federations themselves charge huge commissions to the player for an MLB team to sign them.

That system might work today with a small talent pool it can control, especially when there are well established league and club feeder systems in place, or if the talent pool exists in a small geographical area. As the sport grows in popularity and geography, however (like Brazil), it will become more difficult to control the talent pool, and soon players will be signing outside of the system without any oversight.

The conclusion to me is that any local oversight of a baseball player development system should be fair, equitable and limited, with basic ethical guidelines spelled out on how to conduct the business of signing talent to professional contracts with anyone, not just MLB or the Japanese leagues.

Hopefully, some of these upcoming hotbeds of baseball talent will incorporate some level of honest oversight, and learn lessons from the DR experience before the MLB circus comes to their country.

- Andy Loretta

6.1.11