The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [69]
This kind of climate has done much to boost signing bonuses well over the $100,000 level, and they keep going up. In the 1990s, with bonuses increasing, scouts began thinking that there was more money in signing bonuses than in a major-league paycheck for scouting. Herman Martínez, a player from San Pedro who had turned scout, said of scouting, “You don’t get rich, but you can live on it.” But then a better opportunity started to appear, and Martínez, like many other scouts, left scouting to start a baseball school.
The idea was not originally Dominican. After the draft was established in the U.S., men known as bird dogs began earning a living by training promising youth for the draft. In the Dominican Republic they became known as buscones, from the Spanish verb buscar, to look for. A buscón looked for promising youth, sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and worked with them every day for years, feeding them, training them, teaching them what they needed to know until they were ready, then got them a major-league tryout. When one of their boys signed, they got a percentage of the bonus. The percentage was not fixed: it was typically a quarter and sometimes as much as a half of the bonus.
Not only was there the possibility of earning more money as a buscón than a scout, but to the way of thinking of some scouts, buscones were having all the fun. In the days of Avila and Guerrero, a scout scoured the wild Dominican countryside, sometimes sleeping in a jeep because there were no hotels. Now someone was leading them to prospects. The buscones were the ones who got to buscar.
One of the first buscones in San Pedro plowed up the garden in front of his house to use as a training field. Soon they were occupying bigger fields and parks, renting or buying spaces. Bringing in millions a year, signing bonuses had become the biggest business in San Pedro.
Apollinaire Batista, like many Consuelo natives, was the son of a Haitian cane worker. Batista was a buscón. He supplied all his own equipment, trained teenagers until they were ready to be seen by major-league scouts, and arranged tryouts. If they signed, he said, he took five percent of the bonus, which was an unusually small cut. After the player was signed he found a new prospect, so that he was always working with a small group. He liked to get them at the age of twelve so that he had four years to develop them and they could be ready the moment they were old enough. The younger a prospect, the more money he fetched. So buscones wanted to present all their players as young as possible. But they also had to make sure they were ready, because a second or third tryout gets harder to arrange. Batista had players who were not ready until the age of twenty, which meant a significantly smaller bonus. “You can’t show them until they are ready,” he pointed out, shrugging.
The boys worked out in the morning and went to school in the afternoon. Batista’s goal was to get every boy that he took on signed to a major-league organization. In his best year he got five boys signed. Francisco de los Santos, a seventeen-year-old right-handed pitcher who threw faster than 90 miles per hour and also had a good changeup and several breaking balls, was signed by the Mets in 2008. His bonus was $25,000, which was a considerable amount of money in Consuelo, even though by 2008, the year of the $4.8 million pitcher, $25,000 indicated only a modicum of excitement on the part of the Mets. Bartolo Nicolas, a young outfielder, signed with the Blue Jays for $20,000. Once those two were signed, Batista had another seven ready to show to scouts.
One of the reasons scouts have so many fields to look at in San Pedro is that there are so many buscones. Like cocolo, buscón is a word that may or may not be pejorative, depending on who says it and how. Astin Jacobo, Jr., proud of his late father’s name, did not like to be called a buscón. He said the word carried the connotation of “hustler,” which he insisted