The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [94]
A scout could approach a buscón and tell him an amount that he could get his boy, and suggest he talk the family into taking less so he and the scout could share the extra. The buscón, often trusted and liked by the young prospect, went to the family and told them that he could get a larger bonus if he was willing to leave a cut for the scout. Or he might tell them that they had to pay a cut or there wouldn’t be any deal. Desperate for the deal, the family usually did what they were told. No matter how big a bite they lost, they would be getting more money than they had ever seen, with the possibility of even greater paychecks in a few years.
Buscón Astin Jacobo said, “I’ve been around this sport all my life. Yes, there are some bad guys in baseball, but there are a lot more on top than on the bottom. Yes, sometimes a scout comes up to me with a deal, but I’ve got my father’s name to protect and my son who is trying to be a ballplayer. But this is not the first time I’ve seen shit in baseball. Scouts came up to you, the old-timers, and they say, ‘Listen, I like the kid, but he needs to be seventeen, not twenty. Here is five hundred pesos.’ They used to do that a lot—not all the time, but a lot.”
Because of the increased value of a younger player, false birth certificates were a common occurrence. In 2003, Alfonso Soriano told Yankees general manager Brian Cashman that he was not born on January 7, 1978, as stated when they signed him, but in 1976. Often false identity papers do not even have the correct name. Adriano Rosario from San Pedro, age nineteen, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher who signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002 for a $400,000 bonus, was actually Ramón Antonio Peña Paulino, age twenty-two. Rafael Pérez, manager for Major League Baseball’s Latin American office in Santo Domingo, was quoted as saying that they should have been more suspicious because everyone called Adriano “Tony.” Rosario later claimed that he perpetrated the fraud under pressure from Rafael Mena, a well-known scout in San Pedro. As Astin said, it was often the scout who pushed for a changed age. Then the scout sometimes demanded part of the player’s bonus to keep from exposing the fraud. It was not difficult to handle a frightened teenager trying to negotiate a life-changing deal.
False papers were not only lowering ages to make players more valuable but also raising ages to make players eligible. A boy named Adrián Beltré from Santo Domingo worked at the Dodgers’ academy, where scout Ralph Avila and others spotted his remarkable speed and strong arm. In 1994 the Dodgers signed him with a $23,000 signing bonus—a good bonus for that time, considering that the Dodgers were not competing for him. In 1999, with Beltré now playing third base for the Dodgers, Major League Baseball—which was investigating illegal signings in the Dominican Republic—discovered that Beltré had been only fifteen years old when he signed. The Dodgers were fined $50,000 and banned from scouting, signing, or running an academy in the Dominican Republic for one year, although they did find loopholes to keep the academy open. Two months later, in February 2000, the Braves were fined $100,000 and banned from the Dominican Republic for six months for having signed shortstop Wilson Betemit when he had