It was 1974, and the Pirates were in the midst of a run during which they’d finish first in the National League East five times in six years. They’d won a Sunday afternoon game, and afterwards there was music and beer and pots of Caribbean food sitting aside the usual MLB clubhouse spread.
“Welcome to downtown San Juan,” a Pirates player said to me, tongue-in-cheek, but appreciatively so.
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I got it. This was not Fenway Park, or Ralph Houk’s Tigers’ home clubhouse. There was a lot of Spanish, a lot of singing. The previous winter, I’d gone to San Juan to spend a week with Frank Robinson managing the Santurce Crabbers, a team with Ed Farmer and George Hendrick and Ron Cash, and that clubhouse didn’t seem that foreign to a writer in his twenties who’d begun his full-time service on the Red Sox beat in 1972.
But this was something different altogether.
Move on to the eighties, and in most of the spring training hotels, Latino players generally lived in one section, the American-born players in another. Latino players generally dressed and gathered in one section of clubhouses, and were wary of traditional media. The Red Sox had a young shortstop from Colombia named Jackie Gutiérrez, who when he played in the field whistled intermittently. He had an uncle who ran against Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, so through a Red Sox minor league coach named Felix Maldonaldo, Gutiérrez discussed the uncle, but through the interpreter he also admitted he was afraid of trying English out of fear that he would be embarrassed and become the subject of ridicule. He made a game-losing error in Anaheim on the first night of the 1984 season, and was never the same.
Be it Gutiérrez from Colombia or Juan Beníquez from Puerto Rico or Rey Quiñones from the Dominican Republic, I think about those young players on the lower fields of Winter Haven, Fla. and look around at today’s game.
I’ve heard Eduardo Pérez and Steve Phillips talk about the place of international players in the 21st Century, as well as many others on MLB Network when they are discussing Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Ronald Acuña Jr, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Wander Franco, Xander Bogaerts and, of course, Shohei Ohtani ranking among the dozen best players in the sport when and if the 2022 season begins.
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One of the smartest, most circumspect coaches on the Braves staff last summer compared the baseball skills of Acuña to those of Willie Mays. But this isn’t about comparing great players from different eras. It’s more about noting and appreciating that the reason baseball since the mid-1980s to the mid-2020’s has been so much better, to me, is thanks to the great young international players. And baseball culture has changed so much that many of them have reached All-Star levels at ages when many stateside players are developing in colleges. Hey, on January 15, the announcement of the start of the signing period for international players — for all its serious issues, many of which were detailed in Thursday’s excellent piece by Ken Rosenthal and Maria Torres — was covered by MLB Network, Baseball America, MLB.com and local outlets as legitimate news in a January in which the rest of the “news” in baseball amounts to lawyers staring at one another on Zoom calls, incanting one “nyet” after another.
It is imperative that a way is found to maintain that flow of talent, to nurture these players, and to make sure that they get what they deserve.
After seeing that nearly half the best position players in MLB are international signees, realize this: Teams that don’t invest in the international market are at a financial and competitive disadvantage, which is why the Miami Marlins have plunged into the market from the introduction of this ownership group, and why the Orioles’ Peter Angelos finally allowed his current regime to delve in during this market.
It makes financial sense for teams, though at an unfair cost to these talented players. The highest bonus paid in the January 15 signing period was the $4.9 million the Nationals gave Cuban outfielder Cristian Vaquero; the first pick in last summer’s draft, catcher Henry Davis, got $6.5 million from the Pirates, the second pick, Jack Leiter, $7.92 million from the Rangers. Boston’s entire international signing pool was under $5 million, while they signed Marcelo Mayer, the fourth pick in last summer’s draft, for $6.64 million.
Fifteen teams in the first round signed their first-rounders for as much or more than the $4 million the Yankees gave Roderick Arias, widely considered the top player available.
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Still, it has been a long process even to get to this point. Epy Guerrero opened the first Dominican academy in 1973, and soon the Blue Jays were plucking talent from it. In the 1980s multiple teams followed suit and began scouting and developing Dominican players in earnest, and soon a genuine pipeline was born.
“When MLB opened an office in Santo Domingo and stressed education, it changed virtually everything,” says Omar Minaya, long a pioneer and leader in the Dominican with others like Pat Gillick. Rafael Perez was put in charge of overseeing the academies, stressing the need for education. Gradually, Minaya, Mark Shapiro and other officials instituted programs at the academies, guided players to get high school degrees and learn life tools. This winter, more than 20 teams had graduation exercises for their academy players, celebrating youngsters from all around the Western hemisphere.
“When we see kids like Soto, Acuña and Franco come to the States, we’re seeing the important progress baseball has made,” says one general manager. “I also think the example of great figures from the Dominican like Felipe Alou, Pedro Martínez and Albert Pujols have had a tremendous impact on young kids.”
Many of us used to like to go to the Astros’ former complex in Kissimmee, Florida, where we’d watch Jose Altuve finish on the major league field, then go to the minor league fields to mentor young Latino players because he cared so much about helping them.
The International Draft remains something the owners want, and some fear along with other concerns that it will lessen the flow of talent — this is an entertainment business, after all — the way Puerto Rican baseball was hurt by having young players from that territory eligible for the U.S. MLB draft in 1989.
“The incentive to train and develop young players died,” claims one veteran scout. Indeed, before Puerto Rican players were placed into the draft, the late 1980s produced Bernie Williams, Roberto and Sandy Alomar, Juan González, Pudge Rodríguez, Carlos Delgado, Javy López, Jorge Posada and many others. In the following decade, One Puerto Rican was drafted in the first round (Alex Ríos, Toronto, 1999), one in the second (Carlos Beltrán), and two in the fourth (Yadier Molina, Javy Vázquez).
It has come back from that nadir over time, especially since 2002 with the founding of the Puerto Rican Baseball Academy and High School, which has helped young players like Francisco Lindor go to private schools in the States. Leaders like Beltrán, Alex Cora and Vazquez helped develop the academy (Cora and Vazquez texted play-by-play of Carlos Correa graduating first in his class with a 4.0 average at graduation).
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One MLB executive said last weekend that “programs in Mexico are developing really fast, and will be the next big thing.” Boston’s Mayer, like Red Sox legend Ted Williams before him, has Mexican heritage; his father is Mexican, and played and coached there.
Baseball faces issues in terms of demographics, participation, reduction of professional opportunities, cutbacks in scouting and actual game action. Last summer, Team USA took players from legitimate college leagues, did not actually play games, then advised players to go home rather than fulfill summer obligations.
Those are issues to be addressed in labor agreements, and they are at the same time also issues to be addressed after this current labor-ownership dustup is resolved. But remember that for now, for every nyet you hear, there are more than a dozen star-quality international players — more than half under 25 years old — in major league baseball right now. That Braves coach never said Acuña, now barely 24, was better than Mays in his prime, simply comparable; but in fifty years of covering the major leagues, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Mays used as a comp. Ever.
I remember the challenges those players faced in earlier days, when there was so little support for them, and I remember the things they were called, as well. My advice to players and owners is to find a way to share the glory of these kids now starring in and growing the game today, because Major League Baseball with Tatis and Soto, Acuña and Franco is a lot better than it was forty years ago.
When pitching coach Brent Strom retired after the remarkable success of the Houston Astros from 2017-21 and agreed to work for the Arizona Diamondbacks, so close to his Tuscon home, he studied hours of video and analytics on the Diamondbacks pitchers. One of those pitchers, Zac Gallen, met with Strom before the lockout.
“I thought it would be just a get-to-know-you chat,” says Gallen. “He had video, breakdowns, all kinds of stuff. It was really impressive.”
Long before Strom met Gallen, the coach had broken down the young right-hander’s video and told some Arizona people he thought Gallen could win a Cy Young.
“I heard about it, and was really excited,” Gallen says.
Hence the lockout is particularly unfortunate for Gallen, because he cannot be in communication with Strom and cannot be in contact with the medical staff of the Diamondbacks, who helped him through three separate injuries in 2021. In addition, if, as expected, spring training and even the season is delayed, that will limit his time working with the new staff.
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Gallen was originally drafted and signed by the Cardinals, was traded along with Sandy Alcantara for Marcell Ozuna, then moved by the Marlins to Arizona for Jazz Chisholm. In his first 27 major league starts in 2019-202o for the Marlins and Diamondbacks, he had a 2.78 earned run average, 117 hits allowed and 178 strikeouts in 152 innings, and was a clear top-of-the-rotation starter.
But in 2021, Gallen was hurt three times — a strain in his forearm, some elbow soreness, then a hamstring pull. One team’s scouting report read, “the difference between 2020 and 2021 was that in 2021 he occasionally left pitches in the middle of the plate he never did in the past.”
The injuries factored in. Gallen describes himself as having a “quad-dominant delivery,” and says that at times he was out of sync. The 4.30 ERA wasn’t bad, especially on a team going through a nightmare season, and neither were the 108 hits and 139 strikeouts in 121 1/3 innings.
But Gallen is a meticulous, routine-oriented individual for whom every throwing session, every bullpen has to be perfect. That’s the way he has approached every workout this winter in New Jersey, and will continue when he gets to Arizona later this month to work out with teammates, like fellow University of North Carolina rotation mate J.B. Bukauskas.
“I’m feeling good, I think I’m healthy and will get back to where I was (in 2020). It’s just a matter of the work, doing the work correctly and learning from people like Brent Strom, the Diamondbacks coaches and my teammates,” Gallen said.
At a point in baseball history when the news always seems gray, here is a reminder of someone for whom 2022 could and should be a return to where he was. And, in case you’ve forgotten, in 2020 he was ninth in the National League Cy Young Award voting.
I have been to a four-hour Sanskrit opera, so I have experienced a void of humor. Et tu, baseball labor talks, especially if you’re Rob Manfred and you are representing owners who have widely scattered views on labor, or Bruce Meyer, who was hired by the Players Association to get back some of what the union bargained away as late as 2016. One labor lawyer seeking precedent went back to 1969, when 5,500 General Electric workers in Pittsfield, Ma. went on strike for 102 days — including the parents of shortstop Mark Belanger, who after retiring became a Players Association leader. At the time, GE’s workers charged that management hired gun Ray Grebey negotiated only in “take it or leave it” Boulwarism and that GE was trying to win back what they’d lost in previous negotiations.
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Twelve years later, in 1981, Grebey and Mark Belanger were sitting across the negotiating table, Grebey now representing baseball’s owners, Belanger the players, as they negotiated the issues — one was the owners’ desire to get back some of what they lost after the Messersmith-McNally Decision of January, 1976 — that led to the 1981 strike that forced the cancelation of 713 regular-season games.
Fast forward to today. Another labor lawyer friend from Boston tried to liken these negotiations to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that would lead to American withdrawal from Vietnam, headed by Henry Cabot Lodge and Xuân Thuy 24 days after George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees. I tried to compare eras by noting the Yanks cost Steinbrenner $10 million in January 1973 and in January 2022 the owners of the Triple-A Worcester Red Sox turned down an offer of more than $50 million from a California company buying minor league teams, but no one in these parts wants to hear how much Steinbrenner did to create the boom that began after free agency.
There is, however, a tie worth mentioning between baseball labor negotiations and the Hall of Fame voting. When the two sides were headed towards a strike deadline in August 2002, one of the most divisive issues was drug testing. After the steroids explosion of the 1990s, Bud Selig felt he had to get drug testing. The MLBPA fought back. Selig also told close associates that the game could not afford a strike seven years after ending the longest winter, 1994-95. As the clock to the August 30 deadline ticked down, a compromise was reached that those of us who were there for the first strike in March 1972 still cannot believe.
Gene Orza and Michael Weiner of the Players Association worked off an Orza blueprint and crafted a compromise with Manfred that there would be anonymous testing (hence no punitive ramifications) in 2003, and that if five percent of players tested positive, formal and punitive drug testing would begin in 2005.
The MLBPA was supposed to have disposed of all the results, but the government got involved, some 104 results were seized, but without all the nuance surrounding these tests, including one key complication.
The test results were administered by a California testing company. One problem occurred because tests often showed positive test results for two substances which were not actually illegal, so players had to take a second test five-to-seven days after the first, to allow time for those substances to get out of their systems. Hence, the company had results for players who tested positive the first time, and then negative on the second. When the government seized the tests, this may have resulted in the government noting some individuals as positive whose positive tests actually returned results for legal substances. And that then could explain why Manfred essentially cleared a name (or names) from some of the reports the New York Times listed.
The only two people who knew all the test results were, and presumably are, Orza and Manfred. Anonymity was guaranteed, so while Orza would have liked to have given clarification on a name made public, he couldn’t.
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A decade later, we have media members asserting they would not vote for anyone whose name was ever associated publicly with steroids. Mention hence is tantamount to proof.
Orza and Manfred never have betrayed their remarkable compromise. Some of us believe that the second test issue is what caused Manfred to give David Ortiz gray-area shelter. As individuals have been judged — guessed, in many cases, by hearsay — as clean or not, all either has said is what Orza maintains: “Only Rob and I know the names, and all I can say is that there are players currently in the Hall of Fame who tested positive, and there are several players who voters have kept out that never tested positive.”
I did not vote for Sammy Sosa. It troubles me that I may have wrongly judged him. I’m certain there are players in the Hall of Fame who tested positive, and I feel no remorse.
Suspended is one thing. Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramírez, Robinson Canó and Alex Rodriguez were all suspended, their cases upheld after the drug testing regulations went into place in 2005. Judgment based on speculation can be considered abuse of the right to vote for the Hall of Fame.
But then, for me, baseball is all about the players, and I hope the owners appreciate that.
(Top photo of Acuña: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)