Puerto Rico was a hot spot for amateur talent before MLB added the territory to its annual amateur draft. Now Puerto Rico is clearly behind Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Is the MLB draft doing the same thing to amateur talent in this country?
What do Robbie and Sandy Alomar, Carlos Baerga, Wil Cordero, Carlos Delgado, Jose Hernandez, Javy Lopez, Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, Benito Santiago, Ruben Sierra, Jose Valentin and Bernie Williams have in common? Each of these 13 players hail from Puerto Rico and were signed as amateur free agents from 1982-1988.
In 1990, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, was added to the MLB amateur draft, meaning that players from the island were subject to the same signing rules and terms of draft eligibility as players in the U.S. and Canada. While players from countries outside the MLB amateur draft could be signed as soon as they reached the age of 16, those subject to the MLB amateur draft had to wait until they finished high school.
Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but age is one of the most important considerations in projecting player performance. And it is a huge bonus for a Major League team to get a prospect into its system at an earlier age. A player usually does not finish high school until he’s 17 or 18, putting him up to two years behind a player not facing those restrictions.
The main reason Puerto Rico was included in the MLB amateur draft was to curtail signing bonuses paid to top talents. Since players not subject to the MLB amateur draft were able to hold out for the highest bidder, they were being paid much closer to their market value than their counterparts from the U.S.
At the time Puerto Rico was included in the MLB amateur draft, the stated goal was to institute a worldwide draft. But no other country has been added to the MLB amateur draft, putting Puerto Rico in a serious bind. It has been leapfrogged by several countries, most notably the Dominican Republic as the place for the top non-U.S. baseball talent.
In the 17 years since being included in the draft, only four players from Puerto Rico have approached the level of success achieved by the players from the 1982-88 period. Only Carlos Beltran, Jorge Posada, Javy Vazquez and Jose Vidro have emerged from what previously was a booming market of star players from Puerto Rico.
What happened here?
In a word - money. When teams had to compete to sign the best talent in an open marketplace, they had to spend money, both in signing bonuses and in promoting their brand. Teams would spend money on facilities in these countries, hoping players would develop allegiances to an organization. It’s no coincidence that three of the 13 players listed above (Gonzalez, Rodriguez and Sierra) signed with the Texas Rangers. Teams added locally-based scouts to their payroll to help identify talented players at an early age so they could get the jump on other teams.
But with the addition of Puerto Rico to the annual amateur draft, a team no longer had incentive to invest money in developing relationships in Puerto Rico because a player they spent money on could be drafted by any of the other teams in MLB. So money that might have gone to Puerto Rico now went elsewhere. Like Venezuela, which has sent Bobby Abreu, Edgardo Alfonzo, Miguel Cabrera, Carlos Guillen, Ramon Hernandez, Richard Hidalgo, Victor Martinez, Melvin Mora, Magglio Ordonez and Johan Santana, among others, to the majors since 1990. The Astros have been very active in Venezuela, signing Abreu, Guillen, Hidalgo and Santana from the above list.
Andy Rooney last year got into hot water when he admitted that he had no interest in the sport because, “today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.” Besides exposing Rooney’s xenophobia, this quote illustrates that the stars of the sport are disproportionately Latin.
Much like many poor youngsters in this country view basketball as a way to the good life, many Latin kids see baseball as their ticket out of poverty.
It’s less than honorable to exploit the poor of the world for our own personal enjoyment, which is basically what we’re doing in these Latin America nations. But if the choice is to spend money to allow a small percentage a way out or ignore them completely, I’m quite willing to take the lesser of two evils.
When MLB clubs invest money, we get to enjoy the talents of tremendous athletes that we wouldn’t otherwise see in this country. And the superstar athletes in turn go back and invest that money in their hometowns.
Pedro Martinez is one of countless Latin stars who have made a huge impact in his hometown. Martinez has his own charitable foundation that supports children, healthcare and education in his native country. The Boston Globe described Martinez as being “fabulously generous with his personal wealth in his Dominican homeland.”
We’ve seen what taking MLB money out of Puerto Rico has done to the supply of superstar baseball players from the island territory. And there have been other effects, too. Last summer, the Puerto Rico Winter League canceled its season due to financial problems. The league had been around for 69 years. While it’s not fair to blame MLB for the fall of the PRWL, it most certainly played some part in its demise.
What MLB has done to baseball in Puerto Rico is a shame. But its method of conducting business has had implications in the U.S. as well. The MLB amateur draft was first held in 1965. While the public relations move given for the draft was to create an equitable distribution of talent (the team with the worst record the previous season gets the first pick) the real reason was an attempt to curtail the escalating signing bonuses given to amateur players, who became known as “bonus babies” due to the large signing bonuses they received.
Fast forward to 2008 and we see MLB is no longer the top sport in the country. Many people ask why the top athletes have basketball and football atop their favorite sports list and wonder what can be done to put baseball back on top.
What if we abolish the MLB amateur draft and make everyone a free agent to start their careers? Would the promise of a multi-million dollar contract right off the bat help MLB compete with the NBA and NFL for the country’s top athletes? I believe that it would.
However, I am also not so naïve to think there is any way on this earth that MLB owners would approve such a plan. The party line would be that this would increase the large-market advantage that teams in New York and Los Angeles currently enjoy. But the real reason would be that teams would have to pay market rates, or considerably more than they are paying now, to get top players signed. And no owner would sign off on that.
Instead we will be stuck with the MLB amateur draft. And that means top athletes in this country choose other sports. It means the destruction of Puerto Rico as a baseball hot spot. And ultimately, for premier athletes, it means it is better to be born in the Dominican Republic than the United States, because you have more freedom to pick and choose where you ply your craft.
Baseball may be our national pastime but the way it treats amateur players in this country (and Canada and Puerto Rico) is downright un-American. It is time to end the MLB amateur draft.
12 responses so far ↓
1 BT // Apr 15, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Thanks for the piece.
A thought - are American players reluctant to play a professional sport which demands time in the minor leagues in order to learn their craft?
Does MLB want to use colleges to replace the minor leagues as much as possible in order to make a bad bet on younger players, and in doing so, put less african-american players into the draft pool?
2 Brian Joura // Apr 16, 2008 at 7:47 am
Thanks for reading and commenting BT.
While a few players are going to pick the sport in which they see the most opportunity, most players are going to choose the sport they love. I don’t think it’s a case of fewer Americans willing to put in the time. I think it’s a case of most Americans having another sport as their top love.
While MLB teams would love to do away with the costs of funding minor league operations, almost all college players are not ready to step from the campus to the majors. The NBA is finding this to be more the case and created the NBDL because of it. It’s a different beast in the NFL because of the attrition rate of the athletes, plus the need for rookies on special teams.
Finally, the reason fewer blacks are in the draft pool is because baseball is becoming a middle/upper class sport. With the emphasis on travel teams, many black families are simply priced out of having their sons play at the necessary competitive levels as amateurs.
And this problem of fewer blacks in MLB is over-rated anyway. In 2006, the percentage of blacks in the United States was 12.6 percent. While that is greater than the roughly 8 percent of blacks currently in the Majors, it’s hardly anything to get worked up about. It’s a trend worth noting and following but it’s not catastrophic by any means, especially when we have under 30 stars like Jimmy Rollins, Vernon Wells, Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks, C.C. Sabathia, Ryan Howard, Howie Kendrick, BJ and Justin Upton, Adam Jones and so on…
3 Ryan Hall // Apr 16, 2008 at 8:28 am
Why is getting rid of the amateur draft the solution? The NFL and NBA have drafts as well and that’s not holding them back. Also, the elite players in the MLB draft DO get multi-million dollar contracts/bonuses. I don’t think it’s the money that’s leading to less American athletes picking baseball.
I think the NFL and NBA’s quicker paths to stardom (no minor leagues) probably has influence. I think the fact that baseball requires more work to be a star (it’s harder to rely on athletic ability alone compared to football and basketball) has influence. I also think that the NBA and NFL, esp. the NBA, have become more and more intertwined with pop culture and that sways many kids towards those sports.
Brian, you also bring up a good point about baseball becoming a middle-to-upper class sport. That could very well be limiting the pool of kids who choose baseball, and could very well be contributing to the decreasing number of African American kids choosing baseball. In recent years, the Urban Youth Baseball Academies have started popping up in cities all over America hoping to solve that problem as well as giving more inner-city kids a chance to play baseball. They’ll be the American versions of the academies MLB teams set up in the islands to develop players (I’m pretty sure the Urban Youth Academies are MLB funded). If the Academies are successful, there’s a good chance we’ll see an increase in African American players in MLB over the next decade.
4 Brian Joura // Apr 16, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hi Ryan - thanks for reading and commenting.
While I’m sure MLB hopes that the RBI programs will help jump start baseball in inner-cities, to suggest that they will develop players anywhere on the scale of academies in Latin countries is the highest form of looking at things with rose-colored glasses.
Getting rid of the amateur draft may or may not help the problem. But keeping the draft sure isn’t the solution. I think it’s clear that it caused serious damage to the development of baseball in Puerto Rico and I think it has contributed (not caused, contributed) to the downfall of baseball’s popularity in this country, too.
5 Ryan Hall // Apr 16, 2008 at 10:51 am
I didn’t mean to imply that the Urban Youth Academies would pump out players on the same scale or numbers as the MLB camps in the islands, just that they’d serve the same purpose - develop and teach baseball in an area that could use the nurture and instruction. And I do believe that it is a step in the right direction.
I think the RBI programs and the Urban Youth Academies are two separate things, right? I’m not sure, but I know there are a ton of top high school prospects eligible for this year’s draft that have been involved with the Urban Youth Academy, but not sure how involved. Some of them may have only participated in their Showcases, as opposed to actually receiving instruction there.
If getting rid of the draft might not help, then how can you be so sure that keeping it isn’t part of the solution? You can make revisions to address problems, instead of just gutting the entire system. Maybe they take away PR’s draft eligibility so that they would need to be scouted and signed like the other international players. Maybe international players located within a certain proximity to the US are made eligible for the draft, but MLB places & funds training camps, similar to the ones run by individual teams now, to teach and develop these players. This way the kids there are still receiving instruction and baseball will stay popular there and teams don’t have to spend money developing a player that anyone can get in the draft.
If the draft was done away with and everyone was treated as a free agent coming out of HS there would still need to be some major guidelines in order to keep it from ruining baseball. In order to keep all the top prospects from going to the big market teams (who’ll pay the most), there would need to be some kind of budget restrictions placed universally on every team or something like that.
6 BWS // Apr 16, 2008 at 12:43 pm
As far as baseball in the U.S. is concerned, I think MLB should allow teams to sign players in their geographic regions before the draft. Should players not get a fair offer or decide they would rather play elsewhere, then they may enter the draft. Also, I think it would help reignite minority interest in the game, as a kid could grow up knowing that if he is good enough, he will get the chance to play for his hometown team.
Think back to the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers when many of their stars hailed from Brooklyn. No wonder they were so beloved, since one may be able to see their childhood neighbor pitching at the ballpark. The Atlanta Braves have been signing locally, and I would venture to say that it has sparked additional interest in the Braves; what with their triple-A team moving to Georgia and all.
7 Brian Joura // Apr 16, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Hi Ryan - I don’t know about Urban Youth Academies and RBI - I’ll investigate and post what I find.
My issue with the draft is fairness. Why is it better for a kid to be born in Australia or the Dominican Republic or the Netherlands than in the U.S. - that doesn’t make sense to me. A kid from the DR can come closer to maximizing his earnings than a kid from the U.S. and that, to me, is insane.
Territorial rights are no bargain either. That means Florida and Tampa Bay will have a nice advantage over Seattle and Boston. And what do you do with a kid who grew up in New Jersey but went to college in Arizona?
I know the fear is that the big market teams are going to sign all of the best talent. But take a look at the first round of any draft you want. Before I even look at it, I’m going to pick 1975 because I can’t think of anyone drafted that year off the top of my head.
The top five picks that year? Danny Goodwin, Mike Lentz, Les Filkins, Brian Osinski and Richard O’Keefe. If the Mets and/or Yankees used their financial clout to hoard those guys, it would be good for the rest of the league.
Projecting what 17-21 year olds are going to be like five years down the road is an inexact science. Would big markets have an advantage if everyone was a free agent? Yes they would. But it wouldn’t be either a huge or insurmountable problem. These teams have a big advantage now, being able to draft HS players who’ve announced they are going to college and then attempting to buy them out. Or by going over slot money. Or by drafting Scott Boras clients.
Abandoning the draft will never happen, because it would end up costing owners more money. But it’s still worthwhile for us non-owners to think about and to try to come up with ways to convince the people who run the game that the draft is bad for baseball as a whole.
8 Brian Joura // Apr 16, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Hi BWS - Thanks for reading and commenting.
I already addressed one of your suggestions in my reply to Ryan.
Many players on the Brooklyn Dodgers lived in Brooklyn when they played there, but I don’t think many grew up there. Koufax, Pignatano and the Aspromontes jump to mind. But I don’t think Campanella, Hodges, Robinson, Podres, Snider or Newcombe were born there.
9 Brian Joura // Apr 18, 2008 at 8:49 am
As I promised Ryan upthread, here is some info on the Urban Youth Academy
The MLB Urban Youth Baseball Academy encompasses more than 15 acres on the campus of El Camino College, Compton Center, the Academy is a state-of-the-art facility featuring four fields including a show field, batting cages and other training facilities. The Academy operates on a yearround basis, offering free baseball and softball instruction, as well as clinics to youth throughout Southern California.
It seems like there is only one of these currently and it is separate from RBI. Here’s a link to the press release when the academy opened.
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20060217&content_id=1314301&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb
10 Graham // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I came across your column while doing research for the newspaper I report for. I just thought you might be interested in the letter that Rep. Jose E. Serrano sent to Bud Selig yesterday (http://serrano.house.gov/PressRelease.aspx?NewsID=1550).
In the letter he urged Selig to preclude Puerto Rico from the draft.
11 Samantha // Jul 12, 2008 at 12:46 pm
It is a shame that MLB does not give much importance to Puerto Rico. My younger brother is 17 years old and pitches a ball faster than most MLB adults, and yet I feel his talent will never be known. I guess the only way he will get an oportunity to prove him self would be to move to the Dominican Republic, were the educatonal system is not all that great, lower his standards, so that he can fulfill his dream. That is not fair for him or for many of the talented players we have here in Puerto Rico.
12 Brian Joura // Jul 13, 2008 at 10:17 am
Thanks Samantha - it’s fantastic to get feedback on this story from someone if Puerto Rico. Good luck to your brother and thanks for reading and commenting.
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