The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [44]
Regardless of the high principles that had guided Flood, one of the results was that baseball became a game of millionaires. Salaries like Flood’s $100,000 became laughable. Before there were free agents, in the Rico Carty years, the average salary in the major leagues was $52,300. Carty’s salaries, which seem meager today, were above average. But by 1980 the average had leaped to $146,500. A decade later it was more than $800,000. By 2008 the average was $3 million a year. Signing bonuses, an extra one-time bonus on signing the first contract, also went up; the once token handouts for the most promising players are now in the millions.
At this same time, with jets replacing trains for traveling teams, Major League Baseball began a process of expanding from sixteen teams in the Northeast and Midwest to the current thirty around the country, and this, too, created a hunger for fresh young talent. The most important source of new young players was the draft, in which every franchise got to pick from a pool of undeveloped talent. The lower the standing of a club in the previous season, the higher the pick in the draft so that the last-place teams got the first picks.
But the draft was a highly regulated operation, and teams were limited in the number of draft picks they could take. This placed the player in a good negotiating position. A very promising prospect could refuse the offer. Then he had to wait a year, but a year later he would probably be worth more money to whoever got him. In the meantime the franchise had wasted a pick, because they were limited to the players they drafted whether those players signed on or not. So it might be in the club’s interest to sweeten the deal—fatten the bonus—in order to get the prospect signed, which was why bonuses had been going up.
However, players who were not born in the United States were not subject to the draft. They were declared “amateur free agents,” and there was no limit on hiring free agents, and you did not have to be a last-place team to be first to grab a top prospect. Foreigners became an unlimited source of new talent. This internationalized baseball, opening it up to Venezuelans, Colombians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Japanese. Today, more than a quarter of major-league players are foreign born, and the percentage will probably rise, since the minor leagues are about half foreign born. Moving beyond the limitations of the draft was the original reason, but then a wealth of talent was discovered and they were cheaper to sign than American drafted players of comparable promise.
The first country to profit from this search for nondrafting talent was the Dominican Republic. This was partly because, by the mid-1970s, baseball was accustomed to the idea of Latin players. There had been Cuban and Puerto Rican players, but Cubans were no longer available and Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens and therefore subject to the draft. With a tradition of baseball and the second-worst economy in the Americas—Nicaragua has recently fallen lower and bumped the Dominican Republic up to third—Dominicans were ready to be saved by baseball. When Major League Baseball went looking for foreign players, the first place they looked was the Dominican Republic.
San Pedro and other parts of the Dominican Republic became the feeding grounds of major-league scouts. A scout had to identify a young teenager, develop his ability, and get him signed—a process that sometimes took years—without another scout grabbing the prospect. And so these scouts were cruising the ball fields, often running into and trying to out-maneuver one another. Some, like Pedro González, were ex-players, but many of the more successful ones were not. Epifanio Guerrero, commonly known as Epy, from Santo Domingo, never made it as a