Dropping the B word

If you’ve driven in the Dominican Republic you’ve met men like him: perhaps he guided you into a space in an empty parking lot and promised to look after your car, or else appeared after you’d parked to lay a swath of cardboard over your windshield. You probably tipped him, although he didn’t really do much of anything. You might properly describe this guy as a buscón.

I intend to do a series of pieces on cleaning up the Latin American market, and I think it’s useful to begin here, as I’ve heard intelligent, well-informed reporters broach the possibility of “getting rid of the buscones.” A better start may be to get rid of the term buscón.

In my experience, the only Dominicans who use the word are past or present employees of the American baseball industry. When your man on the street wants to talk about the men who scout, train, and negotiate on behalf of amateur baseball players, they typically use respectful phrases like trainer, coach, or adviser. (When Ynoa signed last July 2, one Santo Domingo newspaper went so far as to describe Edgar Mercedes as Ynoa’s mentor.)

Meanwhile, when baseball people use the word, they tend to do so derisively. The derision may be rooted in the days when Dominican prospects rarely earned even five-figure bonuses, when the advisers were working for something closer to tip money. I also understand it hierarchically: the club employees are insiders and like to remind everyone that the advisers are not.

But the bonuses paid to Latin American prospects have exploded, and the advisers have become increasingly professional. While they have been in the middle of the scandals that periodically shake the baseball world, they perform two absolutely vital functions: They train young athletes, helping them develop the skills and physicality to play pro baseball, and they negotiate with clubs on behalf of the prospects. You might as well get rid of high school baseball coaches and player-agents.

For fifty or so years Latin America has been the Wild West of baseball’s talent market, and cleaning it up is going to mean establishing structure where there has been little. Doing so will not be easy, and MLB will need what help it can get. It would be wise to recognize advisers as partners, rather than annoyances: as men who care deeply for the boys that they train, and who are heavily invested in the success of the Latin American game.

(Photo: Advisers watching a tryout at Baseball City. They were a nervous bunch, toyed with their cell phones incessantly and mostly did not talk to each other. As a group, they gave off the vibe of sports, or hustlers. And yet I found the advisers I met possessing of deep and solemn concern for the well-being of their players.)

More on the Jim Bowden/Esmailyn González affair

I heard quite a rumor through the grapevine the other day, to wit that Jim Bowden and front-office types in other organizations may have made up Dominican prospects, signed them, and pocketed the bonuses.

That is, as I understand the rumor, they would have filed scouting reports on boys who did not exist so that they could embezzle cash from their employers. So long as the bonuses they assigned to these fictional prospects were small enough, they could simply stash the imaginary prospects in their Dominican academies and let the fictional players wash out after a couple of years.

The scheme tickles my funny bone—but then, I had no 401k to speak of when the economy tanked—and while I can’t substantiate it, I think it’s worth publishing for what it says about the murky Latin American talent market.

Two things I take from the rumor:

The bonus-skimming scandal is not the simple victimization story that it is sometimes portrayed as, and it is bigger and more complicated than we understand. While I don’t doubt that some advisors (I prefer not to use the pejorative buscones) rob or otherwise misuse their charges, it seems to me that the heart of the scandal is that FOTs and Dominican advisors have been inflating bonuses for the express purpose of skimming. If that’s the case, to what degree are the prospects victims?

The Esmailyn González affair makes a useful example: the most telling aspect of that story is not that the boy and his advisor lied about the prospect’s name and birth date, but that when the Nationals inked the player for $1.4 million, they reportedly doubled González’ next highest offer. To speculate, if González (now known as Carlos Lugo) did not receive the entire $1.4 million (minus his advisor’s take), has he been ripped off? I think it’s more accurate to say that he’s been used to rip off the Nationals.

(Meanwhile, the Nationals and the rest of the MLB clubs are invested in the Dominican Republic because, in addition to the exceptionally talented ballplayers to be found there, the DR is a developing country, and its economic conditions have allowed MLB clubs to mine talent more cheaply there than they can in the U.S. After many years of signing superstars for $10,000 bonuses, it’s hard to feel too sorry for MLB clubs now.)