ISLAND FEVER

The only thing more congested than the traffic on this island republic is the market for young ballplayers--a fact Sammy Sosa does not have to tout on his billboards here or TV tourist promotions because major league clubs have long been aware of it.

How hot has the Dominican talent hotbed become recently, however?

It is as if Columbus landed here again and discovered the New World.

Or as San Diego Padre scouting director Brad Sloan put it during a recent pilgrimage:

“The only place with more talent than the Dominican is California, and that’s only because the population is larger in California. The Dominican is ahead of Florida and Texas.”

The beat heard here is not only that of the merengue, it is that of scouts foraging the bushes, contributing to a climate that Cleveland Indian General Manager John Hart compared to the “Wild West” and “the last great scouting outpost.”

A combination of increased aggressiveness on the part of U.S. clubs seeking less expensive talent and eagerness on the part of young--and often innocent--Dominican players who idolize Sosa and other Dominican major leaguers and view baseball as an economic escape has also contributed to a climate of potential exploitation and rules violations to the extent that the commissioner’s office is considering opening an administrative branch in the Dominican Republic, having already initiated changes in the process by which ages are verified.

The case of Dodger third baseman Adrian Beltre, who has asked the commissioner’s office to declare him a free agent because he was signed before the legal minimum of 16 and the Dodgers falsified documents in the process, has drawn attention to an atmosphere in which players, clubs, parents, scouts and agents have often acted separately or with complicity to violate policy.

Scott Boras, who represents Beltre, calls it a “corrupt system” in which players are often deprived of representation, knowledge of the rules and an accurate idea of their market value. Juan Ortiz, who is the Dominican government’s commissioner of baseball under sports minister Juan Marichal, put it in the context of the Beltre case, cited the Dodgers’ outstanding reputation in the Dominican Republic and said:

“If the Dodgers are guilty, it’s not only the Dodgers, it’s everyone who is cheating.”

Ortiz, of course, isn’t naive. He knows there has been cheating. Enough Dominican signings have been voided to prove it.

He acknowledged that falsifying ages has been an active business but believes new guidelines and verification methods will improve the situation.

The irony, he said, is that “older Dominican players used to lie and say they were younger, and now younger players lie to say they are older--and it’s all basically a matter of economics.”

The middle class has options and can send their sons to advanced schooling--often in the United States--but the poor tend to view baseball as the only economic salvation.

Not that all of this is an overnight development.

The Dominican Republic has been producing quality players for more than 25 years and the little community of San Pedro de Macoris has long been recognized as the birthplace of shortstops--but now every major league club has an academy or program of significant nature in the Dominican Republic, and even Japan’s Hiroshima Carp have an academy.

Amid rising costs and a drain of U.S. talent to other sports, the international market, from Asia to Aruba, has “become vital to the survival of major league baseball,” said Omar Minaya, assistant general manager of the New York Mets, and the Latin American influence is strongest of all.

There are 16 academies in Venezuela, three belonging to the Indians, who also have two in the Dominican Republic. There were 159 Latin Americans on opening day rosters in 1999--about twice as many as 20 years ago--and the top five vote getters in balloting for the American League’s most-valuable-player award were Latin Americans, as was the World Series MVP, Mariano Rivera.

Of those 159 on April rosters, 66 were from the Dominican, a republic of about eight million people with an annual per capita income of less than $1,000 and a passion for baseball. It is the true national pastime here, an important part of the economy and that potential outlet for the poor--a major motivational factor for young players.

Forget Pokemon. There are 100 little leagues in the Dominican Republic, and barefooted, barehanded youngsters are still found playing in rock- and weed-strewn fields with sugar cane as bats and rolled-up tape or socks as balls--a long way in miles from the $5-million mansion the idolized Sosa recently built here but not in spirit.

Said Pedro Peguero, director of the Dodger academy and, at the time, the scout involved in the Beltre signing: “These kids have the good ability and, more important, they are hungry. These kids, they see [Raul] Mondesi, Ramon [Martinez], Sammy Sosa, Pedro Martinez. They see all these guys in newspapers every day making millions. Big house. Mercedes-Benz. So here it’s everybody’s dream to be a ballplayer.”

Parents often encourage it, and scouts, agents and clubs are quick to take advantage of it.

In the last three years, in particular, Dominican players have been signed in wholesale numbers for bonuses in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, or as Minaya said: “What may not be a lot of money to the club is several years of income to the family.”

In addition, said Hart, it is also an economically prudent course for U.S. teams searching for a “measure of cost effectiveness” at a time when the annual amateur draft is becoming “cost prohibitive.” Many first-round signing bonuses are now more than $3 million and counting, and there are no guarantees of success.

“You can sign a whole lot of players down here and run your whole academy for a year on what it takes to sign a first-round draft choice now,” the Padres’ Sloan said. “You can also take more chances [with those signings] that you can’t in the States because it’s so cost prohibitive. The amazing thing about the Dominican kids is that they all seem to be able to run, throw and field. Find one that can hit and you’ve got something.”

Sosa can, although he has come a long way from the youngster who received a $3,500 bonus from the Texas Rangers in 1985 and now has a $42.5-million contract with the Chicago Cubs. Pedro Martinez, who doesn’t have to worry about hitting the way he pitches, received a $5,000 bonus from the Dodgers in 1988 and now has a six-year, $75-million contract with the Boston Red Sox. Sosa and Martinez are among many Dominican players who hit the lottery. If their modest bonuses were part of a mass system of exploitation, it was also a coveted opportunity.

Ricardo Rodriguez, a 20-year-old pitcher who made his U.S. debut in the Arizona Rookie League in September and is in his third year at the Dodger academy, sees it the same way. “For me, it’s a special opportunity because I get to practice and play baseball, plus I learn to get ready for a different lifestyle,” he said. “It’s all hard work, but for that chance, it’s worth it.”

The academies, for the most part, provide food, lodging and an education in English and other potential social adjustments, as well as baseball. The players receive $800 a month in their first year at the camp, $850 in the second. A Dominican player has to advance to the United States within three years of his signing or be released.

Beltre, who received a $23,000 signing bonus, made his professional debut at the Dodger academy in nearby Guerra. If he was signed illegally, it would be one more abuse in a competitive system complicated by what Minaya called “the corrupt fact-finding methods in many Third World countries.”

The documentation problem has been compounded for many years by the willingness of players and clubs to lie about age, by the influx in recent years of agents looking for their cut of a booming market and by the presence of buscones, who are part bird-dogs, scouts, agents and mercenaries working for themselves or on behalf of a club, academy or a full-time scout. The buscones, Boras said with distaste, often romance underage players, hiding them out while providing the food and lodging they may not have been receiving regularly, and then, when the player is old enough, delivering them to an academy for a $200 to $400 kickback.

“The player has no idea of his true value or that he is entitled to representation,” Boras said.

The Dodgers employ six full-time scouts in the Dominican, no buscones. Ortiz, the Dominican commissioner, merely rolled his eyes when the subject of buscones came up.

Both he and Sandy Alderson, Commissioner Bud Selig’s executive vice president of baseball operations, believe adjustments are being made that will remove some of the abuses.

In addition to the possibility of a full-time major league administrator here (a seemingly long overdue step considering the number of Dominican major leaguers), clubs signing a player must now acquire verification from Ortiz’s office of the birth date and signing date and then submit that form with the player’s contract and birth certificate to the commissioner’s office. Contract approval is withheld until any discrepancies are resolved.

Ortiz would take it further.

He said that in the best of all worlds he would order clubs to sign players only in his office and only after verification of their age. Said Alderson: “I wouldn’t claim [the new method] is foolproof, but I think it provides us and the clubs greater confidence. I don’t believe the incidents of alleged underage signings are being repeated at the numbers they once were.”

Perhaps, but Boras contends that the clearest and most decisive message Alderson could deliver would be for the commissioner’s office to rule that the Dodgers were guilty of signing Beltre illegally and declare him a free agent.

“That would be the death knell of illegal signings,” Boras said, citing both 1) the magnitude of Beltre’s stature as an impressive young player and the first major leaguer to seek free agency through a violation in the rule governing the signing of foreign players not subject to the amateur draft, and 2) the magnitude of his possible loss to the Dodgers.

In the convoluted world of baseball jurisprudence, however, the commissioner’s office is the investigator, judge and jury, and is likely to be under pressure from its constituent clubs not to set a precedent by freeing a major league player and--although there is nothing about statute of limitation in any baseball record book--could raise the issue in that it is five years after the alleged violation.

In addition, the office can’t be thrilled at the prospect of where a free-agent Beltre might take the second-year salary scale and has to be concerned that other major league players, seeing the money, might suddenly play the underage signing card.

Nevertheless, previous rulings have clearly established precedent in Beltre’s favor if documents establish he was signed illegally, as they seem to do.

In every recent case, the commissioner has freed minor leaguers determined to have been signed underage. The most intriguing involves Ricardo Aramboles, a Dominican pitcher who was signed initially by the Florida Marlins for $5,500 and subsequently received $1.52 million from the New York Yankees last spring. He was declared a free agent even though his parents admitted in a letter to the commissioner that, because of economic need, they had falsified his birth date. The ruling seemed to suggest that the Marlins were equally guilty, but if a player who acknowledges deceit can be made a free agent, Beltre would seem certain of a similar ruling based on public evidence to this point.

It is believed that Boras and the Major League Players Assn. will file a grievance and seek satisfaction through arbitration if Beltre is rejected and may also file a grievance if the Dodgers are precluded from re-signing Beltre if he is declared a free agent.

In the meantime, Boras contends that an international draft conducted after eligible players in each country participated in an combine-type tryout in which their age was verified by a neutral party would also resolve the current corruption, in his words.

Perhaps, but amid the poverty here, where baseball is often the only hope and dream, there’s always a new trick.

Said Sloan: “What we’re running into now is that signed players who have been released are trying to sign with other clubs using false names and falsified papers. I mean, here’s a guy with a phony name and some equally phony agent asking for $100,000. You have to hope your scouts are on their toes and can recognize them. You have to do background checks on everyone and everything down here.”

And you have to hope that the background check provides accurate information, but then that’s the way it is in the Wild West of the Dominican Republic.

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Major League Makeup

Of the 841 major league players on opening day roster, 7.8% were from the Dominican Republic. 175 players from outside the U.S.

66 from Dominican Republic