Baseball's Recruitment Abuses
Baseball's Recruitment Abuses
Unscrupulous agents prey on young Dominican players. It's time to clean up their mess, writes University of Pittsburgh's Rob Ruck in the Summer 2011 issue of Americas Quarterly.
Baseball may no longer be the national pastime in the United States, but it remains a pan-Caribbean passion. No other region celebrates the game with such panache or sends so many stellar players to the major leagues. f you visit any ballfield in the Caribbean, it will be hard to miss the talent scouts lurking on the sidelines, systematically picking off young boys who show flashes of athletic promise. But Caribbean baseball’s success has a dark side. The promise of multi-million-dollar payoffs in the north has triggered unscrupulous tactics by a growing industry seeking to profit from the region’s juvenile talent.
The high-stakes game for recruits and prospects has given rise to a feeding frenzy involving a wide range of players, from local talent-spotters and foreign investors to nongovernmental organizations and representatives of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. The lives of boys and the game’s honor—at least what’s left of it—hang in the balance.
So does baseball’s potential to serve as a way to strengthen local communities and economies in the region.
Click here to read the article at www.AmericasQuarterly.org.
Rob Ruck is senior lecturer and historian at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (March 2011).
