The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [70]
“Thirty percent sounds like a lot to an American,” Jacobo said in his New York English. “But I have to provide clothing, schooling, food, housing, a woman to cook them food four times a day, and a staff of eight. I have $7,000 a month overhead, plus balls and bats. I lose four balls a day: they get hit out to the street and kids grab them.
“It costs me between 350,000 and 450,000 pesos in two and a half years to get a player signed,” he added. But those pesos would only be about $14,000 in the U.S., and while a drafted American player does not come with all the nutritional, medical, educational, and developmental issues of a Dominican player, because of the difference in economies, it still costs Major League Baseball considerably more to develop a player in the U.S.
For Jacobo, there was no better place in the world to develop baseball players than his father’s hometown. “I’ve been all over Latin America. This is the best town I have ever seen for baseball, because we have every kind of player here. You could come by a field on a Saturday morning and you might see a few major leaguers out playing with sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.”
The academies were the logical outgrowth of Rafael Avila’s backyard operation in the 1970s. But by the twenty-first century they had become sprawling, sophisticated operations. Every major-league franchise operated an academy. Most of them were in the southeast, either in San Pedro; La Romana, a few miles to the east; Boca Chica, a few miles to the west; or a few miles farther west toward the capital. An academy was a place where a major-league organization could feed, train, and educate Dominican prospects, addressing all their special needs at Dominican costs, rather than those of housing, feeding, and preparing them in the United States. That higher cost of operating in the States was why clubs did not hesitate to give up on their investments and release players who were not living up to their expectations before sending them up to the States. The Dominican Summer League was established as a kind of pre- Rookie League—a last proving ground before paying to bring prospects to the United States.
An academy also gave an organization a scouting base in the Dominican Republic. In the 1970s and 1980s it became apparent that the teams that had operations in the country were getting most of the best Dominican talent.
But the other purpose of academies was to serve as holding tanks while Dominican players waited for their visas, a safe place where the teenagers’ sleeping, eating, and other habits could be controlled.
To many Americans, especially New Yorkers, it seems that Dominicans can easily get visas to the U.S., because so many have. The Dominican Republic, with an estimated total population of ten million, has sent more immigrants to the United States than any other Latin American country except Mexico, with an estimated population of 103 million. But it is not easy to get a visa, especially for poor people. The U.S. Embassy requires a $100 fee just to have an appointment to discuss a tourist visa, and the majority of Dominicans do not have the $100.
Major League Baseball generally gets its players a special visa for people who have proven to be exceptional in their field. But newly signed prospects are brought in as temporary seasonal laborers, like farmworkers, whose visas expire at the end of the season. To get these visas, it has to be established that the worker is not taking a job away from an American worker. The U.S. government limits the number of such visas. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, these visas became even harder to get. Until the player got his visa, he was kept at an academy, where his life and training could be carefully regulated and he could be further screened. Obviously, an organization is not likely