Report on the exploitation of young Dominican baseball players focuses on a D-backs prosect

MARK BRODIE: Some of the top minor league prospects in baseball will be in the Valley next month for the Arizona Fall League. And a number of those players are from the Dominican Republic. The country is the birthplace of about 10% of players on Major League Baseball rosters, despite having a population roughly the size of Ohio.

A new investigation from ProPublica finds many teenaged players from the DR do not end up getting their full salaries or signing bonuses from their MLB teams. That’s because of a system of informal agreements between players and teams, and the involvement of trainers who identify players and the money lenders who work between when a team says it wants to sign a player and when they’re actually allowed to do so.

And one of the main players in this story is a Diamondbacks prospect named Belfi Rivera. Trainers started scouting him by the time he was 7.

Gus Garcia-Roberts is an investigative reporter at ProPublica and wrote the story; he joins me. And Gus, since teams can’t officially sign players to contracts until they’re 16 years old, it sounds like there are these sort of handshake agreements before that and then this whole culture of people who come in on the money side — is that about right?

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: Yeah, that’s about right. It’s a very convoluted, highly competitive, kind of frenzied system in which Major League Baseball gets its Dominican players, or gets its young players from the Dominican Republic.

So Major League Baseball teams have, particularly over the last decade or so, arrived at this kind of routine which is meant to skirt the minimum age at which Dominican players can be signed — and all international players can be signed — which is they have to be at least 16 years old. And instead, teams will make handshake or verbal agreements with trainers, who are the Dominican men who sort of control these kids, two, three, maybe four years before those kids reach that age.

And those agreements essentially say, when you are of age to be signed, X team will sign you for X amount of money — and sometimes that’s in six figures, sometimes it’s in the seven figures.

And on the ground, the results of these kind of handshake agreements, which are basically just a fact of the ecosystem now, Major League Baseball is aware of them, is often these boys come from impoverished families. And so you have this strange financial reality for their families in which they are informed, “Hey, there’s been a deal for your son. So in two, three years, he’s going to make, let’s say, $1.8 million.” But the next day, that family still doesn’t know where their meals are coming from.

And so, yes, as you mentioned, there is a thriving cottage industry of high-interest money lenders who circle the baseball industry now, and they swoop in when a family is in that situation — which happens hundreds of times a year — and offers them deals at often predatory rates, and then more and more sophisticated financial vehicles that in many cases takes advantage of those families and siphons away the future signing bonus of the player.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so one of the players to whom this has happened is a player named Belfy Rivera, who is a prospect in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization. He’s sort of one of the central characters of your story. What was his story? What happened to him?

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: So Belfy Rivera is a kid who is well-known in his neighborhood for just being an almost supernaturally talented baseball player. And so when Belfy is 14, according to the family and others I spoke with, the Diamondbacks make a deal with his trainer to pay him $1.8 million when he’s of age.

And so for his family, they come from extreme poverty. So enter a man who kind of specializes in that situation. His name is Santo Caraballo. And he is probably the most notorious money lender in the Dominican Republic.

And so he makes a series of agreements with Belfy’s parents. The first one he says, “I will purchase 10%” — this is according to the family — “I will purchase 10% of Belfy’s eventual signing bonus,” which is $180,000, and in return he gives them an amount of pesos which roughly equates, they said, to $25,000.

The deals get more and more sophisticated from there, and the family is not given contracts to see, which they would be unable to read anyways. The parents are semiliterate. And the net result of this is Belfy is just playing baseball. He has no idea that these agreements are being made when they are made.

But when it’s time to — in 2024, when the Diamondbacks, you know, make public that they are signing Belfy, make it official, when Belfy goes to the bank to actually collect these bonuses on two separate trips to the bank, he’s essentially left with nothing.

According to him, he received $200,000 of that $1.8 million because the trainer takes out roughly 35%. And Santo Cataboio, somebody who had nothing to do with training Belfy, takes out nearly $1 million.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so you mentioned that MLB knows that this is going on. Like, is there any effort or has there been any effort to clean this process up a little bit?

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: So Major League Baseball has not sort of tackled holistically the issue of early agreements. Instead, whenever an official is asked about it, they either downplay the importance of these early agreements or they say, yes, you know, for example, Rob Manfred, the commissioner for baseball, when he was asked about this during a trip to the Dominican Republic, he said, “We agree that these are problematic, but we think that the only solution to problems in the Dominican Republic is an international draft.”

And that’s something that Major League Baseball has said over and over for years. And up until now, the union has strongly resisted that and said instead that Major League Baseball could be following its own rules and enforcing its own policies that already outlaw early agreements.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, it seems like it really would affect a lot of folks in the Dominican Republic if this system were to change. You know, it would probably stand for a lot of these lenders and trainers to lose a lot of money and for the players and their families to get a lot more of it, right?

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: You know, I’m cynical enough that I think no matter what happens as far as the overhaul of the system, that these young prospects who come from undereducated, impoverished backgrounds will still somehow be prey to sophisticated financial schemes against them.

I think trainers will always be a big part of the system there because there’s just not that many other vehicles for somebody to scout, for example, a 5-year-old or a 7-year-old in the countryside of the Dominican Republic and sort of usher that kid up a scouting ladder until he finally reaches Major League Baseball.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so your reporting focused on the Dominican Republic, but I’m wondering if in the course of your reporting, you got the sense that this situation is unique to the Dominican Republic or this happens in other countries where there also is no amateur draft for MLB?

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: The biggest grounds for foreign players to Major League Baseball is the DR, Venezuela. And those countries, their players are basically treated the same way, which is they are treated as like sort of bulk commodities.

Major League Baseball has a system in which roughly 1,500 mostly teenage prospects play in academies after their signing by Major League Baseball teams. They play in academies in the Dominican Republic. And so what you see is a system in which the philosophy is clearly that Major League Baseball teams sign as many of these players as they can — usually for about $30,000 — and then strain for the best.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Gus Garcia-Roberts, an investigative reporter with ProPublica. Gus, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

GUS GARCIA-ROBERTS: Thank you. Appreciate it.