Play Ball

Tonight begins the final chapter in the storybook season of the Texas Rangers, the little baseball team that could, and has, finally become known for something other than serving as pre-presidential plaything for George II.

Prior to 2010, the Rangers, in their entire history, had never won a playoff series. This year they have won two. Thus far. They need win but one more, the World Series, to be acknowledged as, for a brief turn of the wheel at any rate, the best team in baseball.

In winning the World Series, the Rangers will also serve God and Man, by dispatching those crime lords of theft and violence, the San Francisco Gnats.

As we await this humbling of the malefic, there arrives, via Repeating Islands, a tale that is darker than even that of the dread Gnats—the colonial farming of young boys in the Dominican Republic for the greater glory of the bank accounts of Major League Baseball.

The piece reblogged in part by Repeating Islands appeared originally in the Seattle Times, the work of one Geoff Baker, who appears to be that rare being—a sportswriter with a social conscience.

Baker had reported on unsavory baseball practices in the Dominican Republic in 2006. On October 21 of this year he returned to the subject, in connection with an hour-long report from journalistic exile Dan Rather, aired on his HDNet show Dan Rather Reports, and available for viewing, for a small fee, via iTunes, here.

Rather’s report concentrates on the practices of buscones, who farm Dominican talent for American baseball teams. In the process, these buscones sometimes treat their young charges literally as farm animals—shooting them up with drugs that are supposed to be injected only into livestock.

The word “buscones” is literally “searchers” in Spanish. They are a largely unregulated band of freelance talent scouts and hustlers who groom boys as young as 12 to be future MLB stars. There are few organized leagues in the DR, so MLB teams tend to sign Dominican players based on tryouts arranged by the buscones, who then receive a percentage of any signing bonus as payback for their work tutoring and caring for the players.

It’s a tough, shady world they live in. Some buscones have stolen the entirety of signing bonuses, while keeping more than half of it is not uncommon. And the players being signed are usually 17 or 18 (sometimes 16) years old and the majority will never even make it to the lower levels of minor leagues in the United States.

Rather said he didn’t realize how so many of the prospects under the care of the buscones—and recruited by MLB teams—drop out of school so they can be groomed full-time. Players in the U.S. have to finish high school (or, at least exhaust their playing eligibility at that level) before being eligible to be drafted by MLB teams.

Rather describes the grim life realities faced by players who don’t make it. For every Sammy Sosa-type “shoeshine boy-to-riches” story of a Dominican going on to big league stardom, the abandonment of education means you have hundreds of others who eventually are forced—once their often meagre signing bonuses run out—to go back to being shoeshine men, or petty criminals to make ends meet.

Rather’s report does not pin all the blame on buscones; after all, they’re just giving MLB what it wants. As Baker writes:

Let’s face it, the only reason major league teams care about the DR is because of the cheap talent it offers in teenagers being groomed in professional-style fashion instead of going to school . . . You can sign 100 young Dominicans for the cost of a first-round U.S.-born draft pick and only need a handful of them to pan out for the investment to be worth it.

The performance-enhancing drug situation in the Dominican Republic is bad news. Baker again:

[Rather's report is] an eye-opener for the uninitiated. And it should give pause to people who argue that the MLB steroids issue is hardly life-and-death and is really just about sports entertainment. Not in the Dominican it isn’t. Kids there shoot up with steroids, or farm animal drugs—supplied by the buscones—in order to keep pace with the MLB stars they worship and emulate. I visited the family home of a 19-year-old who died after taking farm drugs supplied by his buscon. He took them because he had a tryout scheduled with the Phillies and wanted to play the way he felt a big leaguer was expected to. You can bet the player’s family wasn’t sitting by the TV applauding on Tuesday when Barry Bonds was honored by the San Francisco Giants pre-game and received a warm, raucous ovation from Bay Area fans.

Knowing their kids have to make a splash by ages 17 or 18, the buscones pump their prospects full of drugs to get them to physically mature more quickly. And it’s not “The Cream” and “The Clear” those kids are getting, either. The DR is a poor country and buscones and players don’t have access to high-tech performance enhancing drugs and the proper medical supervision for taking them.

In many cases, the buscones go with 1980s-fashion, fallback stuff like stanozolol, available without a perscription in Dominican pharmacies. Or, the kids themselves head off to the local veterinarian and buy farm drugs like Diamino, which is meant for horses and cows, but cheaper than your garden variety steroids . . . Dominicans wanting to make it to the big leagues—and their buscones—are desperate and willing to take the risk to level out what they see as an uneven playing field in the U.S. built on a mountain of PED use over the past 25 years.

MLB teams have known for years about this drug use by Dominican teenagers. You’d have to be a bit impressionable, or foolish, as a pro scout to believe that so many 17-year-olds from a country that small could perform the same athletic feats as Americans in their 20s.

Even once it belatedly acknowledged that major-league teams were sending herds of homegrown-American farm animals out onto the field, the sport’s potentates long resisted the notion of testing Dominican teens for performance-enhancing drugs before signing them to contracts. Why? Money. The bean-counters determined it was not cost-effective, “given the expense involved in testing so many kids, the majority of which had little chance of ever making it to the majors.”

Now, MLB is finally beginning to test Dominican teens. Rather reports that a pilot project tested 40 Dominicans in advance of signing contracts; a third of them failed.

Who has MLB put in charge of “cleaning up” the Dominican drug problem? Sandy Alderson. And who is Sandy Alderson? Only the man who from 1983 through 1997 served as General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and thus presided over what was, during the Jose Canseco/Mark McGwire era, the most steroid-soaked clubhouse in the history of Major League Baseball.

It is Good that Rather is still out there, plugging away, doing good work. Like his erstwhile CBS colleague Daniel Schorr, Rather was feared and loathed by wingers, for decades, and finally they got him—just like they got Schorr. But, also like Schorr, Rather has not gone quietly, remaining in the game, even if performing for only a fraction of the audience that once viewed him nightly. Like Schorr, he is finding that the freedom of exile has actually provided him with the opportunity and the space to create better journalism.

It is Bad that the Gnats are in the World Series. They are the spawn of Satan, and must be Stopped.

How I wish my brother were here, to properly abuse their names—I can still picture him instantly transforming the buffoonish loudmouth “Will Clark” into “Fill Shorts.”

The best I have been able to come up with is reviling the human string-bean Tim Lincecum as Sim LipsOfScum, and a real “inside baseball” rejiggering of Matt Cain into Shit Cane.

This last is predicated on a legendary incident of genetic lore, involving my grandmother, a definite wild woman in her youth, but who by the time we knew her had assumed the persona of a proper and pious churchgoer. One afternoon, in her declining years, she reacted to her daughter’s admonition that she needed to get her cane, before attempting to wade out into the world, by blurting out in great frustration: “shit, cane!”  We in the younger crew had never heard an obscenity from this woman before; several of us required medical attention.

The Ranger team that will swat the Gnats is led by a man who has undergone a transformation even more pronounced than was my grandmother’s. That would be Josh Hamilton, a sort of mix of Roy Hobbs, and a grizzly bear on LSD.

Hamilton’s baseball career was derailed for some years because, when not actually on the field, he liked to hole up in his room, sitting atop cases of whiskey and sucking continuously on his crack pipe. Those days are over now; Hamilton is today hooked on Jesus—but hey, whatever it takes.

Occasionally, however, the werewolf returns: in January 2009 Hamilton loped into a Tempe, Arizona bar, wherein he inhaled some alcohol, whipped off his shirt, and demanded of all and sundry the location of the nearest mountain of cocaine. And you know—so what? We all go there. Relapse is a part of recovery. Even the Courts out here in California are starting to recognize this. One day at a time, Josh.

The Rangers also offer Vladimir Guerrero, of the Dominican Republic, where he is known and revered as Miqueas, and where he has helped his people by reinvesting his baseball wealth in a concrete-block factory, a propane distributorship, a supermarket, a livestock and vegetable farm, and a women’s clothing store.

Guererro is getting up there, in baseball years, being 35 and all. Yet he remains a wonderment, rudely abusing Yankee pitching to propel the Rangers into the World Series.

No taint of performance-enhancing drug-use has ever marred his name; he is a true original. He does not believe in the strike zone, but will instead swing at a pitch because he Feels Like It. It is estimated that roughly half the pitches he swings at are balls. Last year Guerrero connected with a baseball that had first bounced in the dirt in front of the plate. Once, after injuring his hamstring running out a double, in his next at bat he lunged for a ball outside the strike zone, and hit a home run—to avoid, he said, having to run the bases.

There is thus no real way to “pitch to” Guerrero, because he will swing at anything, anywhere—”from his nose to his toes” as one baseball wit put it. He is universally acclaimed as the best “bad-ball” hitter in the history of the game.

Guerrero, alone among modern baseball players, does not wear batting gloves. He attributes this to helping his grandfather pull cows home barehanded as a young boy in the Dominican Republic.

Guerrero will help assure that this will be a quiet and sullen off-season, there among the demonic legions who worship the Evil and the Wrong that is the Gnats.