The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [75]
Some were quickly sent up to U.S. farm teams. Others were patiently developed there in the cane field, sometimes for four years.
“Some kids—as soon as you put them in the field you can spot them—haven’t played twenty games in their life,” said Julio García, Latin American field coordinator for the Cubs. He blamed this on buscones. “They find a kid with a good body and say, ‘Do you want to be a Major League Baseball player?’ They teach them throwing and hitting fundamentals and get them a tryout and take between twenty-five and thirty percent of the signing bonus. My job gets harder because they don’t have playing experience.”
This was the main point of the academy system: to give them experience playing games. But also they worked on developing specific skills, especially with pitchers. The Braves organization was the first to emphasize pitching, but now most of the franchises do. José Serra of the Cubs said, “Baseball is about pitching. The Braves decided that a long time ago.” But the young pitchers at the Cubs’ academy are seldom allowed to throw more than fifty pitches.
A young pitcher is easily destroyed, so they are not encouraged to do a lot of breaking balls, which can damage a young arm. José Martínez of the Braves said, “Most of the time, pitchers are asked to throw only fastballs. It builds up strength and doesn’t strain ligaments like other pitches.”
A third or more of the players signed by the Cubs are pitchers. Julio García, a big cigar-smoking Cuban of charm and insight—as long as he was kept off the subject of Cuban politics—said, “We sign pitchers because the arms down here are incredible. My boss came down and told me after watching training that it would take months to see that many arms in the States.”
They have them throw mostly fastballs and changeups. A changeup is a hard pitch to master. It looks like a fastball but the speed is reduced. If the delivery is slow, the batter will see that it’s a slow pitch and hit it far. The motion and speed of the arm must be identical to those when the pitcher throws a fastball. A fastball is held across the seams with a space between the ball and the palm, which causes the wrist to whip it faster on release. A changeup is the same throw but with the ball snug against the hand, which causes no wrist action on release and a backspin on the ball that slows it down. It used to be called a palm ball. If an academy can take a young pitcher with a hard fastball and teach him a truly deceptive changeup, he can be a dangerous pitcher. But it is not entirely enough. Garcia said, “We let them throw occasional breaking balls. They are hard on the arm, but it’s a fine line, because you have to throw breaking balls to develop them.”
Along the road to Consuelo was a compound with a guarded gate. Inside was one of the better-appointed academies. Started in 1991, San Pedro had the only Japanese camp in the Dominican Republic, the Hiroshima Carp Baseball Academy.
There were some clear disadvantages for a young Dominican in signing with a Japanese club. Asked what the Japanese signing bonuses were like, Yasushi Kake, assistant general manager, a husky, gray-haired Japanese man, said, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” Then he mischievously put his hand over his mouth and pretended to whisper, “Muy barato”—Very cheap—and he laughed.
There were some advantages to the Japanese system, money not being one of them. A top Japanese salary is $200,000—minuscule by the standards of the major leagues, but better than the American minor leagues—and when a player signed with a Japanese team, his chances of making it to the top were much better. There was only one level of minor-league ball between a signing and the major-league teams. And the Japanese released very few players once they were signed.
But there were tight controls on letting foreigners