Dominican scouting shifts in baseball

"When we went to the countryside, to little towns for tryouts, sometimes we would sleep and eat in our jeep because there were no hotels," recalled Ralph Avila, a longtime Dodgers scout who signed All-Stars Pedro Martinez, Raul Mondesi and Jose Offerman.

And because the country's high unemployment and poverty rates often left many young Dominicans with no options other than the ball fields or the cane fields, these prospects usually took whatever was offered for a chance to play professional baseball.

But now, with more than $84 million a year pouring in from Major League Baseball, seemingly everyone here is getting into the talent procurement act, bringing a jolt of free-market competition to an economic backwater.

Some of these independent scouts are retired major leaguers coming home and setting up training academies. Others represent U.S.-based agencies such as the Scott Boras Corp. and Wasserman Media, among others. Then there are the many local freelancers, including women and even a few nuns, who hope to claim a share of this growth industry, scouring city streets and dusty sandlots in search of promising youngsters.

They are known locally as buscones, or searchers.

"Dominicans have begun to assert a degree of control in the creation of this baseball product that we didn't see 20 years ago," said Alan M. Klein, a cultural anthropologist who has written extensively on baseball in Latin America. "And that's a good thing."

Not to mention profitable. Last year, the 30 big league teams signed 511 Dominicans for an average bonus of $65,821 -- double the average teams paid only three years ago and more than 30 times what the Oakland Athletics paid to sign former American League most valuable player Miguel Tejada in 1993.

"Buscones are now helping to change that," said Frank Cabrera who, like many Dominican talent scouts, likens the old system to exploitation. "Before a player signed for $1,000, $1,500, because there was nobody to judge his value. It's going to be much better now."

But the downside, say major league scouts, is that many prospects are less educated and less prepared to play professional baseball than players they signed a few years ago.