HUMAN TRAFFICKING OR RESCUING THE FUTURE?

I recommend that you log on to the New York Times and watch the video about baseball “academies” in the Dominican Republic. You will ask yourself, as I have, are these for the benefit of greedy Americans trafficking in human beings, or are they benevolent investors looking to improve the lot of young boys in a backward economy? (It is the kind of story I am sure will end up on Sixty Minutes.)

I would ask you to watch and judge for yourself. For me, I felt a kind of clammy discomfort watching the process. In the beginning we learn that investment in a baseball academy is just that: an investment. Like any investment you expect a return. It seems that you get it, but at what cost? How many young kids from the Dominican will end up like the remarkable closer for the Texas Rangers, Neftali Feliz. How many others will endure a few months perhaps a season, of what we see as substandard living conditions, on the possible chance of success in America’s national game? (It is clear that even though the living conditions are far from perfect, they are far ahead, for many of the kids, of what they were living in at home.)

In Toronto, we used to be a haven for youngsters from the Dominican. We had superb scouting there, and every kid wanted to play for the Blue Jays. And they did, giving us great shortstops from San Pedro de Macaris – Tony Fernandez among them, and sluggers like George Bell. We got guys like Junior Felix whose manager seems to have lied about his age to make him look like a juvenile prodigy when in fact he was a seasoned pro. But that’s not the issue.

The Dominican today is what the inner city ghettos were, and in many ways, continue to be. Historically all the great boxers seemed to come from underprivileged classes, whichever the current group happened to be. When the Irish were at the economic bottom we had Irish fighters. When the black kids strove to escape their misery, the highway to success was through the local gym. The inner cities bred basketball players, and if you remember the movie “Hoop Dreams” you get an idea of how intense the craving was, and how the odds were stacked against you. The same could be said of the kids who want to be Rap stars. They have idols. Those idols are rich and famous.

In the Dominican the idols were the famous little pitching terror Pedro Martinez a Cy Young award winner with the Montreal Expos, The New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox, plus a great parade of shortstops. The youngsters have idols and they see future success in baseball. It is that imperative that the exploiters look for. They need hungry kids and they’ll pay to get them.

When asked about education, the Dominican who seems to be one of the major players in managing the academies admits that most of these boys can neither read nor write. The entrepreneurs who pay for the academies want only a percentage of the hopeful star’s signing bonus. They make words about including education in their programs; I’m not holding my breath.

Professional sports is a hungry monster that feeds on ambitious young men. Sometimes they come from colleges, where even there, the hopeful talent has been recruited by athletic headhunters. Whatever the end result, the great majority will fall by the wayside, returning to their poor life after the little bit of baseball they enjoyed, the word is still “trafficking.”

By the way, the Dominican government does not have any rules to control these academies. It is a capitalist’s dream: profits without interference and conditions without regulation.

Watch the piece. Decide for yourself.