(21 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS:
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – 29 January 2025
++AUDIO AS INCOMING++
1. Little leaguers during baseball practice
2. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Junior Noboa, National Baseball Commissioner of the Dominican Republic:
“What happens with the existing system is that there is fierce competition between the teams. It isn’t unfair; it is aggressive. A lot is demanded of these young kids, and they want these kids, who are still children in the world, to be able to give more than they are capable.”
3. Little leaguers during baseball practice
4. Juan Emilio Pimentel playing
5. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Juan Emilio Pimentel, former catcher in the Dominican Dodgers Complex league:
“Because we were inexperienced and time was moving fast, the system sometimes pressures the managers or families into lying (about age)."
6. Various of kids playing baseball
STORYLINE:
There was little sleep in the days leading up to Jan. 15.
Dozens of teenage baseball players across the Dominican Republic lay in bed, unable to close their eyes. They had batted, pitched and ran until sore, sacrificing time away from family since they were children with hopes of returning with a life-changing pay day. Hopes of becoming the next David Ortiz or Pedro Martínez — big league stars with inconceivable financial security.
Suddenly, for some, that future they fought for was at risk, all because of one promising pitcher half a world away.
Now, for some, the future they had fought for could be upended with an Instagram post.
Pursued this offseason by presumably every major league team, Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki announced on Jan. 17 that he intended to join the Los Angeles Dodgers, two days after MLB’s signing period for top international prospects opened — the same period in which hundreds of Dominican players hoped to finalize handshake deals with MLB teams and finally cash the checks they’d sought for years. The 23-year-old Sasaki signed a minor league contract with a $6.5 million bonus -– money that otherwise might have gone to those Dominican players.
Instead, the Caribbean country’s baseball industry was forced to once again face a system many say is broken as it struggles to find a solution.
One issue is early verbal deals with the families of young Dominican players.
For now the system, despite years of corruption and criticism, is a form of free agency in which scouts fan out across the Caribbean country in search of talented players as young as 10 years old who then live and train at academies in hopes of reaching a handshake deal on a multimillion-dollar contract with an MLB franchise before they’re 16. This year’s signing period was for players born between Sept. 1, 2007, and Aug. 31, 2008.
The Dominican poverty rate is over 20%, and some families live on less than $2 per day. One big league signing bonus — for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars — can transform the life of a player, his family and others around him. It’s an enormous amount of pressure, and it falls squarely on kids who would barely be halfway through high school in the U.S.
“I believe that the demands are too much, and that’s why we’re seeing some cases of falsifying ages,” Noboa said, noting that baseball scouts insist on seeing young teens play like adults.
Every year in the Dominican Republic, there are at least 40,000 players who are 16 and able to sign under MLB rules, but only some 550 to 600 are given deals, said Eddy Lorenzo, a local scout.
AP Video by Martin Adames
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