The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [68]
The job of handing new prospects their signing bonus checks fell to a Dominican employee of Major League Baseball, Aaron Rodríguez. “What I love about it,” said Rodríguez, “is that the first thing most kids do with their money is improve their parents’ house. If it was wood it becomes blocks, or they paint it. But I always tell them to save a part of it. I tell them, ‘You are not big leaguers, and this is the biggest amount of money you are going to see until you get in the major leagues, and you may not get to the majors.’”
They earned nothing while training at the academy. Dominican Summer League paid $600 a month, which was better than the sugar mills or the free zone or a resort-hotel job but not life changing. Even when they got to the U.S., minor-league players earned little. Not until the majors was there another chance at significant money. Usually the lecture was not necessary. Most of the young Dominicans bought something for their family. In many cases, a signing bonus alone is enough to change an entire family’s future.
Alberto Medina worked as a welder on the big machines in Consuelo for sixteen pesos a day. His father was a field supervisor earning four pesos a day. Medina said, “If a kid gets a signing bonus of $25,000, that’s a million pesos! He isn’t poor anymore.”
In the first few years of the twenty-first century, $25,000 was an average signing bonus, already ten times as much as Rico Carty, George Bell, and Sammy Sosa were paid.
In 2008, 423 young Dominicans signed major-league contracts and were paid a total of $41,057,000 in signing bonuses. Both the number of players signed and the total amount of bonus money steadily increase from year to year. On July 2, 2008, under intense competition, a sixteen-year-old pitcher from Puerto Plata, Michael Inoa, received a $4.5 million signing bonus from the Oakland A’s. He was a six-foot-seven-inch right-hander throwing faster than 90 miles per hour. Height is increasingly valued in pitching, especially after the impressive career of Randy Johnson, who was six feet, ten inches tall and threw 100 miles per hour. A taller pitcher has long arms and releases the ball significantly closer to home plate, giving the hitter a split second less to identify the pitch. But also being longer and higher, he can get more torque on the throw because he is coming down from a higher position, which is why the pitcher’s place was raised to a mound in the first place.
Some of the scouts compared Inoa to Randy Johnson. But Johnson was taller and he was left-handed. Left-handed pitchers are more valuable because they are rare. A six-foot-seven-inch right-handed pitcher from San Pedro had recently made it into baseball record books. On August 22, 2007, Daniel Cabrera, pitching for the Orioles, let a three-run lead slip past him and the Texas Rangers went on to win 30 to 3, the worst loss in Major League Baseball history since 1897.
The Inoa bonus created a whole new level of daydreams among Dominican teenagers. Real wealth could be attained without a career, with only a signing bonus. Part of the reason was the rule concerning sixteen-year-olds. Every year there was a new crop of players who were to become available on July 2. All the scouts knew who they were before that date and had decided how far they were prepared to go in order to get which player. In 2008, Inoa was the one they were talking about most. The Red Sox had given more than a million-dollar bonus to a pitcher the summer before,