Major strides made in Dominican

BOCA CHICA, Dominican Republic -- Like so many poor youngsters in this country of preternatural baseball fanatics, Yonata Ortega learned the sport in the streets, batting around a sock filled with sand with a stick cut from a guava tree, and catching with a glove fashioned from a milk carton.

Now, the 17-year-old shortstop has been signed by the Arizona Diamondbacks for $20,000 up front, and is training here in their new facility an hour's drive from the capital, Santo Domingo, hopeful that one day he'll make it to the major leagues.

Yonata's is the "Dominican Dream" shared by many young men in this Caribbean nation: that they might follow in the footsteps of big stars with humble beginnings, including Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox. In a country that contributes one-fourth of the players to the major leagues -- by far the greatest number from any country outside the United States -- baseball both as entertainment and as a ticket out is worshipped with an almost religious fervor.

"Dominicans talk about two things: politics and baseball. If you don't know about baseball, you simply don't exist," said Jovani Cruz, 50, a theater director who was watching Game 2 of the World Series Sunday at Santo Domingo's outdoor Beer House Cafe, breaking off to holler at the big screen when Ortiz hit a long foul ball.

If Boston wins the series, vowed Rodolfo Castillo, 25, a lawyer cheering in a Sox hat at the next table, "We'll celebrate as if it's Independence Day."

If there is anywhere with more intense aficionados than Fenway Park, any place where fans are rooting as hard for a Red Sox win, this is it.

Rewards, but risks
For the players and their families, many of whom come from very poor circumstances, baseball is seen as one of the few avenues out of the barrio.

"As soon as parents know that they're pregnant, immediately they assume it's a boy and they imagine he will play baseball," said Jonathan Leyba, 29, supervisor of scouts for the Diamondbacks here and the first Dominican signed for the club's rookie league before an injury took him out several years ago.

Yamila Ramon, 24, an actress and devout fan who was watching the game at the Beer House, said that when big league players come home to visit, "They drive around in expensive cars and fix up their mothers' houses, and the young players see that.

"Baseball becomes a negative when a boy says, `I don't have to study because I'm going to be a big league player.' But you have to remember -- a lot of Dominicans are selling drugs on the streets of America; these baseball players are not doing that."

The underside of the national obsession is that only a tiny fraction of the players makes it to the big leagues. Along the way, sports officials acknowledge, many are encouraged by unsophisticated parents to drop out of school and are exploited by greedy street agents -- unofficial scouts who scour for talent, provide some training, and then introduce them to team officials.

And a desperate few may resort to shooting up dangerous concoctions to enhance their performance during tryouts, a problem brought to light last year when it was reported that two young hopefuls eager to be signed on by clubs had died in 2001 after injecting veterinary drugs.

Major League Baseball, which has its only overseas operations office in the Dominican capital, and the Dominican Baseball Commission have taken a number of steps to address the shortcomings in the system.

This year, MLB began mandated drug testing at each of the "academies" operated here by 26 US clubs, a few years after imposing inspections that are credited with forcing certain clubs to replace unhygienic dormitory facilities with ones that meet US training camp standards. A proposed Dominican law would raise the minimum age for signing prospects from 16 to 17 to encourage players to finish school, and would limit to 10-15 percent the cut that street agents can demand from their proteges' bonus checks, according to Jose Daniel Calzada, former commissioner of Dominican Baseball who proposed the new law four months ago.

Calzada admits there have been problems with unscrupulous "buscones," or "seekers," taking advantage of unsophisticated recruits by demanding as much as 50 percent of bonuses or faking kids' ages to get them signed. But Calzada says the presence of an MLB office has provided oversight so that not only has the quality of official training camps improved, but "little by little, problems of fraud and falsification are disappearing."

Two sides to it
Enrique Soto, a high-profile and controversial street agent whose former clients include Baltimore Orioles star Miguel Tejada, angrily rejects allegations of dishonest buscones and drug-abusing players.

"It's a campaign to discredit Dominican baseball," he asserted. "Today our players are getting salaries comparable to the grand stars of baseball, and there are teams who don't want to spend the money, so they are trying to put a bad name on us to justify low signing bonuses."

Questioned about the 35 percent fee he demands of any bonus, Soto responded, "Trainers give food, gloves, bats, everything to kids, sometimes for years. They make an investment."

One MLB official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the industry should be praised for teaching English, basic literacy, and nutrition in the academies, and offering a livelihood to some 1,200 young people annually who get not only signing bonuses and a shot at the big leagues, but relatively generous monthly salaries in the meantime.

"Yes, it's true that some players are dropping out of school," said the official, "but the truth is many of those kids already dropped out because they have to work for their families to survive. It's the Dominican government that's not providing the means for kids to stay in school . . . nor a Little League structure that allows them to learn to play" while they are in school.

The proposed law that limits how much local agents can take from players will come too late for Yonata, who will pay the Dominican "manager" who worked with him for two months $5,000 of the $14,000 after-taxes check he received from the Diamondbacks two days ago. Still, the gangly, baby-faced youth doesn't begrudge the man the money: "He deserves it. Without him, I wouldn't be here."

With the money that remains, the youth who two years ago couldn't afford his own bat or glove will replace his mother's tin roof with a concrete one and buy his father, who is a manual laborer at the port, a $4,000 license to operate his own business. His monthly $500 salary will go straight into savings, he said.

"If God doesn't let me get to the majors, I'll go back to school and try to get a profession," he said. "But I've got the hunger, and I'm doing everything possible to get there. I'm not the first [Dominican to dream of] going to the US, and I won't be the last."