NO FOREIGN SUBSTANCE : Angels Have Developed Few Latin Americans, but Plan to Change That

Think you know your franchise history, Angel fans? OK, who is the best Latin American player to be signed or drafted by the Angels and reach the major leagues with them?

Stumped? There’s a good reason: The Angels have never had a home-grown Latin American player who, during his Angel career, was considered one of baseball’s best players.

While the always- competitive Dodgers have been building their franchise on a foundation of Latin Americans, only 54 players from Latin America have played for the Angels in their 37-year, World Series-less history. Of those, only 20 were signed or drafted by the Angels.

And of that 20, only a handful were considered above-average--shortstop Dickie Thon, third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez, and pitchers Pedro Borbon, Ed Figueroa, Minnie Rojas and Luis Sanchez.

But Borbon played only one Angel season (1969) and Figueroa two (1974-75) before being traded to the Cincinnati Reds. Thon played two Angel seasons (1979-80) before moving to Houston, and Rodriguez, an Angel from 1967-70, had his most productive years in Detroit.

While the Dodgers’ Latin American pipeline has produced superstars such as Raul Mondesi and Ramon Martinez, the Angels have not had a home-grown Latin player on their major league team since 1988, when Urbano Lugo and Gus Polidor played for them.

The Dodgers currently have 12 Latin American players on their 40-man roster; the Angels have one, pitcher Fausto Macey, acquired from San Francisco in the J.T. Snow trade last November.

“You have to wonder as a fan, ‘Has there been some policy against it? Do the Angels not want Hispanic players?’ ” said Angel President Tony Tavares, who began running the team last May, when the Walt Disney Co. assumed managing control.

“That’s not true, but for whatever reason, the organization has not been committed to Hispanic players.”

That would appear to be the Angels’ loss because Latin America is such a bountiful source for prospects that 20% of the 1,120 players on today’s 40-man rosters now come from the region.

If the Dominican Republic, with 107 players on big league rosters, were a state, it would rank second only to California (185) in the number of major leaguers produced.

Puerto Rico (42 players) and Venezuela (39) each would rank among the top seven states, along with Florida (89), Texas (57), Illinois (52) and Ohio (39). Mexico (15) and Panama (11) have produced as many players as 24 other states.

Many of the game’s biggest stars, including Mondesi and Martinez, Juan Gonzalez and Ivan Rodriguez (Texas), Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera (New York Yankees), Sammy Sosa (Chicago Cubs), Edgar Martinez (Seattle) and Roberto Alomar (Baltimore), hail from Latin America.

And the teams that have placed the most emphasis on scouting Latin America--the Dodgers, Braves, Blue Jays, Yankees and Orioles--are among baseball’s most successful franchises.

“There’s an abundance of talent down there,” said agent Scott Boras, who represents several top players from the region, “but I just can’t even remember the Angels going after a premium player from Latin America.”

And if you know the Angels, you know the reason . . . money.

“We’ve never devoted the type of budget that it takes to do it right,” said Angel General Manager Bill Bavasi, who has been with the organization 13 years. “Since I’ve been here, this club has never put any emphasis on scouting the Latin countries.”

The Angels employ four full-time scouts in Latin America--two in Venezuela, one in the Dominican Republic and one in Mexico.

The Dodgers devote 16 full-time scouts to Latin America, nine in the Dominican.

Almost every team in baseball has an academy for young players in the Dominican Republic--the Dodgers have what is considered the best--and the Angels had one for several years in the early 1990s.

But with the team in escrow in 1995 and former owner Jackie Autry cutting costs, the Angels slashed their international scouting budget in half, saving about $1 million and eliminating the Dominican academy.

With so many talented players in Latin America, though, how can the Angels afford not to mine the area more vigorously?

“If you’re given X amount of dollars, you decide where to put it, and you can either spread it out and be thin everywhere or concentrate on one thing, like the [U.S.] draft,” Bavasi said.

“If someone were to water down efforts in the draft to become more involved in Latin America, that’s a mistake, because the draft is by far the most productive entry we’ve got.”

True, but the appeal of Latin America is you don’t need unlimited resources to be successful scouting there. Though agents have helped some Latin players secure bonuses in the $1-million range recently, Latin America is still highly economical, with average signing bonuses ranging from $2,500 to about $25,000.

Atlanta outfielder Andruw Jones, one of the game’s rising young stars, signed for $46,000 out of Curacao three years ago, millions less than top American players get in the draft.

“Atlanta got a franchise player,” Boras said, “for cheap.”

Puerto Rican players are subject to the U.S. draft, but players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and other Latin countries are free agents who can sign with any team.

But when you’re as tight-fisted as the Angels--their budget for signing players outside the United States last year was believed to be about $50,000--it’s hard to be competitive.

“Other guys are out there with the atomic bomb,” one baseball scout said. “The Angels have a pea-shooter.”

Bavasi hopes to beef up his arsenal.

“If you have enough resources and ownership wants to make sure you’re strong in the draft and in Latin America, that’s one approach and the right approach,” Bavasi said, “and that’s the approach current ownership is looking at.”

Bavasi and Bob Fontaine, Angel vice president for scouting and player personnel, are putting together a proposal to increase international scouting efforts, a process that began with last year’s working agreement with a Mexican League team, and Tavares is receptive.

“We are committed to improving the talent in our minor league system, and the only way to do that is to leave no stones unturned,” Tavares said. “We have to be broad-based, and it’s crucial to improve our scouting in Latin America. But am I going to do it the exact way it’s been done in baseball? Probably not, because I don’t take past history as gospel.”

Front-office officials, scouts and agents say there are two strategies for procuring Latin American talent.

There’s the Dodger way, a long-term, institutional approach in which players are signed in volume at a very young age, cultivated for several years in academies and then promoted into the minor league system.

Or there’s the quick-hit approach, in which teams focus on premier players and try to outbid others for them.

Some teams can afford to do both, but the Angels do neither.

“The key is to sign the premium guy,” Boras said. “You don’t have to have the whole program like the Dodgers, but you have to spend money to get the best guys. . . .

“The opportunity to sign the premium player is there, but the Angels haven’t been given the budget to compete.”

Latin players don’t always sign with the highest bidder, though.

Manny Estrada, international scouting director for the Orioles, said the key is getting to the players early. “Latin kids are very loyal, prideful,” he said, “and if you get to them first and work with them for a few years, they want to stay with you regardless of the dollar figures.”

The key to getting to those players, of course, is scouting--hardly an exact science in Latin America.

Latin American players can turn pro when they’re as young as 16, as long as they turn 17 on Sept. 1 in the year they sign. For that reason, scouts begin focusing on players when they’re 13 or 14.

The best scouts are able to project those youngsters who will develop into star players, but conditions are not always prime for such evaluations.

“The biggest obstacle is you’re usually not looking at organized games,” said Terry Reynolds, the Dodgers’ director of scouting. “Scouts go off on four-wheel-drive vehicles and some even ride animals to get to beat-up fields where kids are playing with a two-year-old baseball.”

Third-world conditions make scouting some Latin America areas even more difficult--and dangerous. Red Sox scout Danny Monzon was killed in a car crash in the Dominican last year.

“You really have to pound the bushes--some guys are still riding donkeys or going through sugar-cane fields to see players,” Estrada said. “In some towns, the buses don’t have headlights. . . . The danger is incredible, so that’s why it can get sticky.”

It’s also critical for Latin American scouts to cultivate a network of bird-dog scouts--called buscones in Latin America. These are usually youth-league coaches or town officials in outlying areas who bring players to scouts and receive cash if they’re signed.

“Any time you’re doing free-agent work it’s cutthroat,” Estrada said of the competition. “Sometimes you have to sign a player on the spot without seeing him. There are plenty of stories of scouts hiding in trees or behind cars and starting bidding wars, where the kid plays one team off the other.”

Some teams go to great lengths to keep a hot prospect under wraps until he’s old enough to sign--many accused the Braves of hiding Jones so other scouts couldn’t see him.

“We had a guy in Aruba who flew to Curacao three or four times to see Jones play in weekend tournaments, but he never played,” Estrada said, “Sometimes I wonder. . . .”

Another way to secure players is to offer a spot in a baseball academy on a trial basis.

“A lot of kids just want to go in because they want a month’s worth of food and clothing,” Bavasi said. “Once you get a kid in the academy, he’s basically signed.”

Bavasi, however, said a nice academy in the Dominican is worthless without good scouting.

“The Dodger academy is nice, but the reason they have so much success is they find the better players,” Bavasi said. “Then the academy helps you develop them. But unless you have a good bird-dog system and can hunt down the best players, forget the academy.”

Bavasi would not discuss details of plans to increase the Angels’ presence in Latin America but did say he’s “looking seriously” at the team’s international scouting program.

“I don’t know if we need as many scouts as the Dodgers, but we have to figure out what we need to be productive,” Bavasi said. “If you have a budget to do one-tenth of what the Dodgers do, you’re just throwing it away, so we’re evaluating that, trying to restart the situation.

“I know this much--there’s a direct correlation between scouting in Latin America and success in an organization.”