The dark side of baseball scouting

[NewsWhore]

TV's Dan Rather, formerly of CBS news, focuses on the business of baseball in the DR and how searchers scout for cheap talent. He says it is a numbers game. In the DR you can sign up 100 young Dominicans for the cost of a first-round US-born draft pick and only need a handful of them to pan out for the investment to be worthwhile. For instance, David Ortiz was signed for US$10,000 by the Mariners in 1990. "For every Sammy Sosa-type "shoeshine boy-to-riches" story of a Dominican going on to big league stardom, you have hundreds of others going back to being shoeshine boys or petty criminals to make ends meet," writes Geoff Baker who covers the Mariners for The Seattle Times. He focuses on the changes now that the MLB sent Sandy Alderson to overhaul the way the baseball academies work in the DR. The story focuses on drug abuse by Dominican teenagers and how MLB teams knew it was happening. "You'd have to be a bit impressionable, or foolish, as a pro-scout to believe that so many 17-year-olds from a country that small could perform the same athletic feats as Americans in their 20s," he explains.
"The 'buscones' arranged for this to happen," Rather said of the drug use. "The Dominican government has a lot to answer for... but MLB's responsibility is that they have been big enablers."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2013225527_new_story_on_dominican_republi.html

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