Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2022. View the full list.
For Nationals star Juan Soto, the process of becoming a professional baseball player was clean, simple. Unlike his peers in the Dominican Republic who started boarding at independent baseball academies at 13 or 14, Soto waited until he was 15 to start working closely with one of the trainers who develops prospects scouted by major-league teams.
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“I was one of the last ones from my class who hit the market” for the 2015-16 international signing period, Soto said.
Soto’s abbreviated journey to netting the $1.5-million signing bonus he’d eventually receive would be difficult to replicate these days. The landscape in the international market has changed dramatically since the 2017 implementation of a cap on how much teams could spend on international amateurs, who become eligible to go pro after turning 16. Clubs are reaching verbal agreements with players in their early teens with alarming frequency. And longtime player-agent Ulises Cabrera and others say that corruption in the system, including a scheme in which some trainers pay MLB team scouts under the table, is more prevalent and widespread than in the past.
“MLB has allowed the industry to spiral out of control,” said Cabrera, who co-founded the Dominican Prospect League in 2009 with a mission to improve the evaluation process of amateurs in his native land.
A number of officials for major-league clubs agree with Cabrera that the situation is untenable, with one high-ranking team executive referring to the amateur player situation in the Dominican Republic as a “cesspool.” A number of the trainers — who serve as a combination of agents, mentors and coaches for young Latin American amateurs — also are fed up with the current situation. Eddy Fontana, a long-time trainer based in the Dominican Republic’s northern region of Cibao, calls the signing process “a failed system.”
The question is how to fix it.
Major League Baseball has long sought to implement an international draft in an effort to control the often-times frenzied acquisition of — and spending on — international amateurs. The league, according to sources, proposed an international draft in recent collective-bargaining discussions with the Players Association, after failing to reach agreement on one in the 2017 CBA. The union has made proposals separate from a draft to address the problem of early agreements, which are prohibited by MLB but remain common practice due to the league’s lack of enforcement.
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Questions persist about whether a draft would be a cure-all for the problems in the international market, and how the league would implement such a process in Latin American countries that don’t have the same travel, high school and college baseball infrastructure that exists in the United States. The league already has certain programs in place — combines, showcases and the like — and would scale up those programs under a draft system, sources said.
Cabrera acknowledges a draft would put an end to verbal agreements with players in their early teens. Yet both he and the union believe the league can accomplish the same thing simply by establishing and enforcing a rule prohibiting teams from becoming involved with players below the age of 15. He also points to another concern: Dominican stars such as Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr., three of the current faces of the game, receiving lower signing bonuses as amateurs than their draft-eligible counterparts from the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. The league says more money would flow into the system with an international draft, drawing the bonuses of Latin American players closer to those of players in the domestic draft.
Dominicans comprised about 10 percent of the 780 players on opening-day active rosters in 2021, the most of any country outside of the United States, which had about 72 percent. Prospects from the Dominican Republic, however, would not be the only ones affected. All told, players from Latin American countries accounted for more than one-fifth of the major-league playing population. Latino players occupy an even higher percentage of roster spots in the domestic minor leagues — 35 percent, according to MLB.
“Latin American players have suffered and continue to suffer through great inequities,” said Cabrera, who works for the Octagon agency. “Not only do they typically sign for less despite similar skill compared to American players but they also are subjected to an evaluation and signing system that doesn’t protect them in any way. It’s time for all of us in positions to effect change to do what is right, independent of the interests we might hold.”
The proper way to address those inequities is up for debate. But those who know the system best were not fooled by the annual burst of excitement that occurred when the 2021-22 international signing period opened with a flurry of official deals on Saturday. Not when so much remains amiss.
Corruption in the international market accelerated after the introduction of a hard cap in the most recent collective bargaining agreement, according to those familiar with the market’s workings.
Under the 2012-16 CBA, teams routinely exceeded their bonus pools with little regard to penalties that included taxes and limits on future spending. The league responded by seeking firmer restrictions in the next agreement and the union proposed to cap the pools rather than accept an international draft. The pools increased at the rate of industry revenue, giving clubs a rough idea of how much they could spend in each signing period in the five-year term.
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Eager to beat their rivals in the market, teams started reaching deals with players at even younger ages, telling them in essence, “If you don’t agree with us now, the money might be gone by the time you are eligible to sign.” It became the norm for top prospects to commit to teams by the time they were 14, two years prior to becoming eligible to sign. Once the terms were set, the players would disappear from the market, working out only at their trainers’ facility. In some cases, teams are said to have pledged contracts to players even as young as 12.
At this stage, teams often don’t even try to hide their circumvention of the system. At least one director of international scouting who spoke to reporters last weekend said he and his staff had been working for three years to sign many of the players they inked to deals at the start of the current signing period.
Trainers had to adjust their development timelines to the level of demand. It is no longer unusual for trainers — who usually take as much as 50 percent of players’ signing bonuses to help cover years of development and housing — to have 10- and 11-year-olds practicing and staying at their academies. One NL executive with extensive experience in Latin American countries cites competition as the reason clubs are willing to commit to increasingly younger players. Given the prominence of Latin American players in baseball, the executive said, “teams have to win in this environment.”
The trend appalls Soto, one of the game’s biggest stars.
“They want you to be able to run 60 yards and throw 100 and hit the ball everywhere from birth,” Soto said. “That’s not how it works. That’s impossible. As much as you try to make it normal, that just won’t happen.”
An international draft assigning players to the teams that select them would eliminate pre-arranged deals. But the union believes such deals can be eradicated without a draft if the league implements stricter enforcement and creates additional flexibility within the pool system, sources said. The ability to carry over pool space from one year to the next, the union believes, would make the claim by a club to a youngster that money was running out more of a hollow threat.
Cabrera, meanwhile, says a draft will not stop what he calls “nefarious dealings” between trainers and major-league scouts. He did not provide specific examples of such dealings, but others in the industry, including multiple international scouting directors speaking on condition of anonymity, support his contention that unethical behavior is rampant.
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“There is common knowledge throughout the industry that a significant number of team personnel are working for both their MLB team and receiving some form of compensation from trainers,” Cabrera said.
The system, as Cabrera and others with knowledge describe it, works like this: An area scout from a major-league club ventures outside his assigned region to find talented players. The scout, after identifying a prospect he likes, influences the player’s trainer to sell a percentage of the youngster’s future bonus to another trainer from the scout’s own region. The player transfers to the trainer and commits to signing with the scout’s team, often for an inflated bonus. And the scout is compensated by the new trainer, sometimes in the form of cash, other times with housing arrangements, vehicles or other material goods.
“It’s a mafia,” said Chico Faña, a former Phillies minor league hitting coach and catching instructor with more than 20 years experience as an amateur trainer in his town of La Vega. Faña estimated that scouts from nine teams engage in the underhanded activity with a select group of trainers.
Cabrera says the kickback schemes proliferated during the coronavirus pandemic. He and other agents say they made the league aware of the unethical dealings, but that the league did not take action. MLB has tolerated the chaos, Cabrera and some club officials believe, in part to convince teams and trainers that a draft is the best way to solve many of the issues in the international market.
“They want it screwed up, so the teams will say it’s screwed up and that they want to change,” one club official said. “It’s like an NHL fight. They just let it go.”
The league acknowledged hearing allegations of corruption, but found them difficult to prove, sources said. As for the charge that the league willfully ignores corruption, an MLB spokesperson said, “That’s absurd.”
The latest proposal for an international draft, according to some with knowledge of the league’s plans, stemmed from a collaborative effort between league officials, local officials and some trainers asking for system change. Yet even with a draft, Cabrera says, a trainer still could pay a scout to identify and recruit players from other trainers. And the scout still could receive a benefit from the bonus the player receives once he is drafted.
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“The issue is everybody has to be on an even field,” Faña said, referring to players who get shut out of the market. “Everybody has to have the same opportunity and no one is giving it to us. No one is letting us do it because they have a ring of people who are controlling the system.”
A solution, Cabrera says, could be to hold scouts and their teams accountable for their actions, as the league has done at times in the past. In 2016, MLB penalized the Red Sox for orchestrating international package deals — that is, funneling money to highly regarded players through the signings of lesser ones. In November 2017, MLB banned former Braves general manager John Coppolella for life after his team was found guilty of a series of violations in the international market. The league voided the contracts of 13 Braves prospects, prohibited the team from signing two high-profile players it had been expected to sign and put strict limits on how much the club could spend internationally for three signing periods.
In a country like the Dominican Republic, Cabrera says, “it should not be a very difficult assignment to determine whose quality of life and standard of living is not consistent with their job title and earnings.”
The unscrupulous practices of clubs in the Dominican Republic extend beyond the questionable relationships between certain scouts and trainers. Under the current system, teams on occasion will renege on the verbal agreements they strike with players.
“Let’s say a team sees a kid. He’s 15. They love him,” an international scouting director said. “They say, ‘We want him. We’ll give you $2 million.’
“Then they go and do that with several other players. They’ve gone over the max. They can only spend $5 million. They’ve promised $7 million. So (when the market opens) they go to some of those kids and say, ‘Hey, we overspent.’ You’re going to take a cut of $500,000 or $1 million.’”
Fontana experienced that first-hand during the 2020-21 signing period. One of his players had been committed for over a year to sign with a specific team for $1 million. The team informed the player in early June — less than a month before the original signing period was supposed to open — that its international budget had been slashed.
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“I was fortunate enough that I was able to sign him the same night with another team, but for (less than half of the original amount),” Fontana said. “It’s not just me. I have a lot of colleagues that are seeing their verbal agreements being taken away. Because they (the teams) have that right. We can’t do that as trainers. If we say to a team ‘Oh sorry. I’m getting more money from X team. I’m gonna go back on my agreement,’ then we’re irresponsible. So these are the things that the system itself is allowing teams to do. That’s why I say it’s a failed system.”
When a team seeks reductions in bonuses, it will do so not with the top player in its class, but the ones below him, the team official says. Those players often will have nowhere to turn, because by the time the market opens, other clubs need to honor their own pre-existing deals, and have reached their limits.
Teams also will back off deals after citing problems in a player’s physical, forcing the player back into a market where his value is dramatically reduced. “Now if you’re 16,” Soto said, “scouts don’t even want to see you.”
Which exacerbates another problem: The use of performance-enhancing drugs, and not just by players trying to reach verbal agreements with clubs well before they turn 16. Some older players who get passed over during their original international signing period also turn to PEDs.
In 2018, MLB established a partnership program with independent amateur trainers in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Panama and Venezuela. According to the league’s web site, the program focused on developing players in a “safe and healthy environment while following rules and acting ethically.” It introduced random testing of registered amateurs for steroids and other banned substances. The process, in theory, holds trainers accountable. But not every trainer is in the voluntary program, which boasts about 100 members.
Some in the industry suspect that certain trainers who operate outside the program administer PEDs to their players for a period of time before registering them with the league; players only need to be registered six weeks in advance of their intended signing period. Recently, a prospect from the signing class of 2024 who had reached a verbal agreement with a team tested positive for PEDs, according to a rival official. That player was training at an academy not affiliated with MLB.
Some players who get passed over in their original signing period, meanwhile, turn to PEDs in a last-ditch attempt to counter their depressed values after they turn 16. Multiple clubs report they had several players 17 or older test positive this year. The older players who don’t turn to PEDs often must accept bonuses of $10,000 or less, an amount that doesn’t count against a team’s signing pool.
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Fontana is among the trainers in favor of a draft. He frets that older players are being deprived of opportunity, and says the current system leaves trainers financially strapped because they must start developing players at younger ages.
“At the end of the day,” Fontana said, “this cannot continue.”
Yet Fontana also is aware of baseball’s unique place in Dominican culture, in part because so many youngsters view the sport as a path to a better life. As of 2020, nearly one-fourth of the Dominican population, representing about 2.5 million people, lived in poverty.
“The other side of it (is) people say it’s an abuse to bring in a kid at 12 years old — that’s not true,” Fontana said. “Let’s be realistic. Most kids that are in our academies are kids that are coming from poverty, kids that don’t have the opportunity (to get ahead). And when they come to an academy, in the majority of cases, we’re providing them an opportunity that they probably didn’t have back home to eat three meals, to dress well, to go to school.”
The league believes an international draft would provide certain advantages.
It would reduce the pressure on scouts to recruit 12- and 13-year olds. Scouts might monitor youngsters at that age in the United States to build a database of information, but because verbal commitments with those players make no practical sense, they focus almost all of their attention on draft-eligible types.
It also might further reduce the use of PEDs among Latin American youngsters; the league plans to follow a drug-testing procedure similar to the one it employs domestically, where the top 300 prospects identified by MLB are required to undergo a random, unannounced test prior to the draft.
Teams that scout extensively in Latin America might privately oppose a draft, knowing they would lose their competitive edge over teams that invest less. But the league points to broader benefits, believing the increased structure from a draft would help diminish corruption by creating more transparency and a more level playing field and forcing clubs to be more open and collaborative. The league could increase scouting and player development staffing in the countries subject to the draft, and believes its relationships with baseball federations in those countries would create plentiful opportunities for player exposure.
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Rather than give players up until six weeks before their intended signing date to register for their period, the league would require them to declare for a draft at least nine months in advance. The use of steroids could be counteracted by a uniform drug-testing policy that would apply to all players, not only those working with trainers in the current partnership program.
Scouts, following a more robust calendar of evaluation opportunities, could focus their efforts on evaluating draft-eligible prospects. Teams then could draw from a stronger base of knowledge when offering bonuses, which the league could theoretically increase as teams become more confident in players’ projections. Under the league’s plan, 94 percent of amateur players who signed during the last international signing period would have received more money through a draft, sources said.
Additionally, players would be protected from being low-balled. Each pick in the international draft would come with a hard slot, meaning that a player would receive the assigned value of his selection.
A draft, however, would eliminate the freedom of choice in the current market — though in practice, that choice can already be limited. The system would remain capped, making it impossible for a Latin American prospect to strike as lucrative a deal as Cuban infielder Yoán Moncada did with the Red Sox in 2015, the penultimate period before the hard cap went into effect. Moncada, later traded to the White Sox as part of a package for left-hander Chris Sale, received $31.5 million. The Red Sox also paid a $31.5 million tax on his bonus, bringing their total outlay to $63 million.
For Cabrera and other advocates of amateur Latin American talent, therein lies the rub. The international pools for the 2021-22 period range from $4.64 million to $6.26 million. The pools for signing players in the first 10 rounds of the 2021 domestic draft ranged from $2.9 million to $14.3 million, and the top pick had a slot value of $8.4 million, more than $2 million above what any one team could spend internationally.
“When (the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr.) signs for ($7.79 million) as a high-school shortstop (in 2019), then the No. 1 player in the Dominican Republic should be signing for something similar,” Cabrera said. “And if they’re not signing for something similar, you’ve got to have a pretty good reason why a kid in the Dominican Republic who has just as much skill as the American version is receiving $2 million to $3 million less than his counterpart, if you don’t have an excuse like, ‘We’ve got to stop the underhanded dealings out there.’”
League officials say the higher bonuses in a draft would help correct the disparity. International prospects, according to people involved in the process, currently receive lower amounts because teams don’t see them in game settings as frequently as players who are eligible for the domestic draft. International prospects also lack the leverage that domestic players wield. Top high school picks often extract lucrative bonuses from major-league clubs by threatening to accept a college scholarship. Most Latin American players have no such recourse.
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Yet, for all the league’s optimism about the potential of an international draft, the adoption of one through collective bargaining might be no more likely than it was in 2016, when the union, reacting to widespread pushback from international major leaguers and independent amateur trainers, opposed the idea.
The union generally is more concerned with the interests of its members than amateur players, as evidenced by its acceptance of caps both domestically and internationally. But an unknown yet significant percentage of international players are believed to remain opposed to a draft.
Cabrera believes with better oversight, the league could accomplish many of the same things it wants to achieve with a draft, without the complications. As he puts it, “What MLB needs to do in the Dominican to help protect players and our industry is to simply hold people accountable and have them feel the pain of doing things the wrong way.” No team has been publicly penalized for misconduct in the international market since the Braves in 2017.
In the end, Cabrera says, the question is whether an international draft is the right solution for Latin American prospects who too often are exploited by a system that does not treat them the same as their counterparts in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.
“These kids,” Cabrera said, “are the future of our sport.”
The Athletic’s Evan Drellich contributed to this story.
(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images; H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty Images; Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via AP Images)