Like Players, This Story Is an Old One

The Angels’ top up-and-coming pitcher is actually three years older than the club thought. Turns out, he’ll be 29 on March 23 and thus should be approaching his prime.

The Atlanta Braves’ shortstop wasn’t really a teenager when he won the National League rookie of the year award in 2000. He was actually 21.

And the San Diego Padres’ shortstop recently turned 29. Last year, he was 26.

More than two dozen Latin-born major leaguers--including Angel pitcher Ramon Ortiz, and shortstops Rafael Furcal of the Braves and Deivi Cruz of the Padres--have aged virtually overnight amid a federal government crackdown on immigration documentation in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

As a result, players who might have fudged their ages years ago trying to attract teams looking to sign young prospects are being outed by INS agents who will no longer overlook minor discrepancies--such as conflicting birth dates--in documentation.

“This was something that clearly needed to be addressed,” said Steve Phillips, general manager of the New York Mets. “You want to have the truth to make informed decisions. I mean, there is a difference between 22 and 25, and 25 and 28.”

Clubs have long struggled to obtain official records to accurately document the age of players from impoverished countries, but they accepted the risks as part of doing business in the key foreign-player market.

Executives say the discrepancies are now raising concerns about making multi-million-dollar commitments to players who might be much older than they claim. Moreover, officials believe that this spring’s revelations are only the beginning because there might be as many as 100 minor leaguers with false documentation still under the radar.

“We’re becoming more aware of the trend of baseball players to use false documents ... and we’re seeing most of the fraudulent documents from the Dominican Republic,” said Christopher Lamora, a state department spokesman. “The bottom line is that people, not just baseball players, will use false documents in the process of applying for a visa. We catch them, a lot of the time, because their stories just don’t match [their documentation].”

Baseball players in the Dominican Republic are often encouraged to lie about their age by intermediaries who arrange tryouts with teams. Once on that slippery road, it’s hard for players to change course.

Lamora said that officials from the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo have met frequently with representatives of the branch of the commissioner’s office in the Dominican capital, as well as with teams, stressing that accurate birth information is a prerequisite for obtaining visas.

But lying is tempting for a player who sees a baseball contract as a way to raise his family out of third-world poverty.

“It’s a totally different socio-economic situation than in our country,” Colorado General Manager Dan O’Dowd said. “They’re looking for a way out, they’re looking for an edge, and someone in a leadership position suggests that that’s what they should do. A lot of these kids don’t know any better; they’re just taking direction from people they learn to trust. There has to be personal accountability as well, but they’re in a really difficult situation.”

Clubs seek to sign skilled 16-year-olds, the minimum signing age, hoping to stock farm systems with players who have “high ceilings”--lots of potential--scouts said.

Players believe the younger they are, the more attractive they are to scouts, increasing their chances of joining a team and getting a big signing bonus.

“The way out of that place for them is to play baseball, and if it means cutting down their ages to impress a scout, then that’s what they’re going to do,” said Tom Lasorda, Dodger vice president. “If a guy is 21, and he tells a scout he’s 18, that makes him more in demand....

“As a scout, when I send you to camp in the United States, the organization will look at you as a good-looking ballplayer if you’re 18. But if you’re 22, they may not look at you the same way. Younger is better.”

In one of the most recent cases, the Angels discovered earlier this month that Dominican right-hander Joel Peralta, who saved 23 games at Class-A Cedar Rapids last season, will turn 26 this month, not 22. Another Dominican right-hander, Hatuey Mendoza, is 23, not 22.

Chicago Cub pitcher Juan Cruz was revealed to be 23, not 21 as listed in the team’s media guide, when his application for a visa recently was red-flagged. Said Cruz, “Sometimes you’re doing whatever you have to do, but it’s not correct.”

With a wink and a nod, baseball officials for years have chuckled at questions about age, viewing discrepancies as part of the game’s folklore. And this spring most have taken a light-hearted approach--at least publicly--with players who are aging years at a time.

When the Padres learned shortstop Cruz was three years older, the team had a birthday party for him at its Peoria, Ariz., spring training complex.

“There were three candles on the cake for the three missing years, and we had a hat for him and everything,” General Manager Kevin Towers said.

Underage signings, secret tryouts and the influence of street agents, known as buscones, had resulted in a Wild West atmosphere in the Dominican Republic. The commissioner’s office acknowledged as much on Dec. 5, 2000, when it opened its first Latin American office in Santo Domingo.

The staff’s main assignment was to protect players from being signed underage. However, the charter has been expanded to include working with the governments of the U.S. and Dominican Republic to help resolve age discrepancies in the visa process, and provide teams with better information.

Twice in the past three years the Dodgers have been embroiled in controversial cases involving Latin American players. In June 1999, the commissioner’s office granted free agency to two Dodger minor leaguers who accused the team of holding secret tryouts in Cuba and spiriting them off to the Dominican Republic, where they took up residence at the Dodger Baseball Academy.

Later the same year, it was revealed that Dodger third baseman Adrian Beltre had been signed by the club before he had reached baseball’s minimum age of 16. Beltre’s Dodger personnel file contained two birth certificates--one showing he was 15 when he signed, and another with the year of birth whited out and changed to a date that would have made his signing legal.

Now, players must present official birth certificates to clubs in order to sign contracts. Copies of birth certificates are kept on file at the Santo Domingo office as well as with the clubs players join.

“We have had an increased effort in the Dominican Republic,” said Pat Courtney of the commissioner’s office. “We found that there just wasn’t a good handle on things, and we wanted to have an increased presence in the community.”

Clubs want accurate information because of the dollars involved in signing bonuses and multiyear contracts.

“From a baseball standpoint, age is a factor,” Towers said. “You talk to any scout or [chief executive officer] about a player, and the first thing they ask is, ‘How old is he?’ There are peak times for pitchers and position players, and history gives us a pretty good gauge of when they’re in their prime and when they [go into decline]. Accurate information is especially important when you’re talking about players in their mid-30s.

“If you think you’re signing a guy to a multiyear contract when he’s 31, you might not have the same feeling about doing a deal if you knew he was really 34 or 35. Not to mention any names, but there have been some players signed to big deals who broke down really quickly. Some people wondered how they could lose it so quickly, and the suspicion was that they were older than people realized they were. With what the commissioner’s office is doing now [in the Dominican Republic], you at least have some sense of certainty when you talk to your owner.”

Said Dodger General Manager Dan Evans: “If you traded for a player under the research and guidance that he was two or three years younger, thinking that he was part of your long-term future, and then you suddenly found out that he was two, three or four years older, it would make you think twice about what you gave up. The years of a player’s career being his prime are such that, when you start advancing his age, you start to have concerns.”

But baseball executives said it would be unfair to single out the Dominican Republic as the only hotbed for age falsification. After all, legendary pitcher Satchel Paige once mused, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

“We have phases of [media attention] on different parts of the game, where some things are talked about more at certain times for a lot of reasons, and this is just the topic of conversation for this year,” Montreal Expo General Manager Omar Minaya said. “Last year, it could have been the strike zone. Next year, it could be that the balls are different. This just happens to be caught in the web now.

“The funny thing about this is that this is nothing new. I can tell you, as a guy who scouted for many years, we’ve known that there are certain parts of [the U.S.] where you don’t know how old some players are. It’s just something that scouts run into sometimes.

“This is just part of baseball.”