Lakeland, Fla. — In the spring of 2009, at the grizzled age of 17, Avisail Garcia was playing right field in Single-A games for the Tigers.
It was impressive, imposing, status for an adolescent.
It also was part of ancient history, as it were, for the Tigers and for MLB teams that had seen Venezuela as at least a semi-accessible nation loaded with baseball gold: young talent.
The Tigers especially were busy there. Detroit was one of four teams along with the Cubs, Phillies, and Rays that had club-financed Venezuelan academies in Venezuela. It was an important beachhead for a MLB franchise already displaying the brand of personnel one South American nation could bring to a team’s roster.
It was self-evident, even if a glittering Venezuelan cast — Miguel Cabrera, Magglio Ordonez, Victor Martinez, and Carlos Guillen — had not been original Tigers signees, but had come to Detroit via trades or free agency. What the men represented, rather, was the bounty of talent from one country that, in line with so many other and stars, boosted MLB rosters in both leagues.
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What also could be seen in those players’ personal histories is their clear-cut route to professional baseball in the United States. They would sign at minimum age, 16. They would play that same year in the Venezuelan Summer League, and then perhaps in the winter Parallel League. And at age 17, when they legally could migrate to the U.S., it would be on to America and to the minor leagues there.
Now, the MLB academies are gone from Venezuela, Detroit’s complex included (closed in 2016). Gone, too, is the Parallel League, which operated as a kind of farm system for the elite Venezuelan Winter League. Top teen talent now is obliged to go through a visa process and relocate to the Dominican Republic.
“Having an academy there was important,” Tom Moore, who heads international scouting for the Tigers, said of the Tigers’ earlier base in Venezuela. “And just as important was having a team in the Parallel League. That really played a large part in Avisail Garcia going to the States at 17 and being able to play at Low-A ball that year and not have the bat knocked out of his hands.
“Because he had 100 games of experience (combined, Parallel and Venezuelan Summer League) before he set foot on U.S. soil. The experience they had against older competition was just unmatched.
“It allowed those players to have a certain level of comfort. And it gave us the assurance that once they got to the States, they were ready for the challenge.”
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Venezuela’s collapse forces shift
Venezuela has since fragmented. Its economy is in pieces, all due to a near-exclusive reliance on boom-and-bust oil, abetted by successive presidents — Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — who didn’t stanch as much as enlarge leadership’s dalliances with corruption and concentrated wealth.
Consequences have been wide and devastating. Baseball, one of a proud nation’s happiest exports, has suffered and has lost much of its vibrant youth leagues, along with at-large athletics that once were part of a country’s rich fabric.
The Tigers have not abandoned Venezuela. They maintain seven full-time scouts there.
But the epicenter for mining international talent, for all MLB teams, is now the Dominican Republic.
The Tigers have expanded operations. They have added a second team in the Dominican Summer League, which is where freshly signed 16-year-olds can get basic training in professional baseball ahead of that legal move to the U.S. at 17. They have six full-time scouts there, as well as a director of Latin American development, Euclides Rojas, a Cuban native who with his family defected in 1994 and — after getting nearly tragic directional misinformation — was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. Rojas previously was a MLB bullpen coach with the Red Sox, Marlins, and Pirates.
The extra DSL team is important for the Tigers, and probably overdue. It creates a second set of roster spots from which prospects can mature and occasionally surprise with development and skills that might not have been on full display at 16 — or earlier.
Note that word: earlier. It is at the heart of what is widely acknowledged to be an oily, even ugly, system that MLB presumes to be policing but often cannot. It is a world where MLB team commitments are made to trainers — buscons, in native parlance — when players as young as 13 and fall under the tutelage (and just as often, control) of these baseball-camp overseers. That “commitment” can precede by years the player legally signing at age 16.
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Feeling a draft
Negotiations between MLB and the players’ union continue with expectations that next month an International Draft will be finalized and introduced in 2024. The draft is expected to span 20 rounds and will have firm caps, just as the domestic draft functions.
Although the Major League Players Association has been opposed, believing it will crimp higher-end player bonuses, the sides are expected to compromise. And to agree on a format that should streamline scouting and distance MLB teams from the current morass. That market, that reality, can induce teams and buscons to privately shake hands on players as young as 13 — if not younger.
Moore agreed the international draft is probably a necessity. What he didn’t say is that the Tigers figure to benefit by a more evenly configured and supervised system.
“Having a draft, with all 30 (MLB) teams making a draft-day decision at the same time,” Moore said, “that, ideally, is what I think eliminates any issues you’ve alluded to (early teen commitments).”
He does not dispute that some clubs (assumptions can be made that it’s many, if not all, teams) are forging deals well ahead of that 16th birthday.
“All it takes,” Moore said, “is for one club to say, ‘I’m going to tie up that 13-year-old and then have 10 more clubs say, well, I’m going to get that 12-year-old.’
“We all joke that some year we’re going to go to the Little League World Series and scout.”
Except it isn’t a joke.
“There are showcases all the time,” Moore said. “We’ve got them for the 2023, ’24, and ’25 (international) classes. And when you think about it, those are seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders.”
Otherwise, it’s usually up to the buscons to arrange with individual clubs single-day exhibitions of their athletes.
“The challenge to see players and analyze ability is harder,” Moore said, speaking of the current system.
He shares general MLB thoughts that an international draft would help concentrate players at pre-draft showcase events, for the benefit of all clubs — and perhaps for the teens.
“You can say, ‘I want to see Player X for 10 days in a row,’ and that way you can see him 10 in a row, and not feel pressured,” Moore said. “It’s a free-agent market (currently), and so always the question for a club is: ‘Do you sign this guy today? Is he going to be around tomorrow?’
“Often, players are having to show up 10 days in a row for this team or that team, and it’s taxing, physically, for them to go through that.”
Moore went on, explaining that pre-draft gathering of teen talent, with displays all 30 MLB teams can take in, is efficient — for everyone.
“Teams can evaluate them however they want to evaluate them,” he said. “That’s going to be beneficial to the clubs, because they can build a history, and it’ll be beneficial to the players because they don’t need to exert themselves 10 times to show themselves to 10 clubs.
“Obviously, it helps the trainers, too, when they’re not having to figure out, ‘Do I show this player to the Chicago White Sox or Kansas City Royals, or the Tigers, on Tuesday?’ You run into a lot of complexities here.”
Among those “complexities”:
How much of a kickback does a buscon get from the adolescent’s family when these early signings are quietly made, even if it’s alien to MLB law? Moreover, how much pressure is there for the player to sign and have his money distributed among family members — even extended family?
What everyone in the interim does concedes: Banking on international baseball players so young makes MLB teams long for the comparatively better odds of a Las Vegas casino.
Moore says a typical year’s international class nets 50-60 players who make the big leagues, and five-10 who are average or better performers.
The Tigers might offer themselves as examples in these international crap-shoots. Their big-league add-ons from other countries have been relatively few and well-spaced.
Moore counters, saying Tigers hauls in Latin America need to reflect broader facts and context. That includes looking at three players the Tigers signed and later traded away: Garcia, who was dealt in 2013 for Jose Iglesias; shortstop Willy Adames, traded in 2014 for David Price; and Eugenio Suarez, a home-run-slamming infielder dealt to the Reds in late 2014.
Also factored is that the Tigers signed these players and later traded them when they were annually a playoff team. The incentive then was to win now and not worry about the future, a debatable strategy when the Tigers haven’t reached the playoffs since 2014.
But that was the call as then-general manager Dave Dombrowski pushed to the hilt to deliver late owner Mike Ilitch his dream of a Tigers world championship.
Ironically, the Tigers signed that same trio of players — Garcia, Adames, Suarez — when, because they were winning, they had had lesser bonus allowances from MLB.
Moore has hard data here: The Tigers from 2007 to 2011 did not sign a single top-30 player (in terms of bonus money). Adames in 2012 pulled $420,000 and was 51st. Suarez, in 2008, was paid minimum scale: $10,000.
Suarez averaged more than 32 home runs from 2015-21. This is separate from the 57-game 2020 season (COVID-shortened) when Suarez still slammed 15. Playing this year for the Mariners, he has 12 homers in Seattle’s first 61 games. He was signed in 2008 for minimum pay: $10,000.
Then there’s Adames, the shortstop now shining for the Brewers whose talents were so clear, even at 19, the Rays demanded him as primary treasure in their trade of Price to Detroit.
“If you want to take WAR,” Moore said, speaking of the popular performance measure known as Wins Above Replacement, “Suarez has the highest WAR out of that (2008) class.
“Willy Adames has the highest WAR out of that 2012 class.”
Those two players could have been helpful to a 2022 Tigers team that otherwise starts (when healthy) Jeimer Candelario at third base and last December invested $140 million and a six-year contract in shortstop Javier Báez, whose debut season in Detroit has been, at best, shaky.
In the earliest phase (pre-2012), the Tigers had zero players in the top 30 signing bonuses.
In the second era, as the Tigers were in the thick of pennant races and at the bottom of the bonus barrel, they had one signing in the top 30: Julio Martinez, a supposed power-hitting outfielder who in 2014 was delivered for $600,000. He was released in 2017, having hit eight home runs in 680 at-bats during his brief Tigers farm career.
‘Since the last interlude kicked in, in 2017, the Tigers have had eight players signed to top-30 bonuses, and seven in the next 30.
Not coincidentally, it’s the latter crop the Tigers see as their path to better times and better rosters: Cristian Santana, Roberto Campos, Manuel Sequera are notables there. Jose De La Cruz, a muscular outfielder with strikeout issues that Sequera is steadily matching, is part of that group. So, too, are some celebrity signings who either have all but washed out or who own numbers that are ominous:
Alvaro Gonzalez, Pedro Martinez Jr., Carlos Irigoyen (2017). Their 2018 big-bonus picks were Jose De La Cruz and Adinso Reyes. It is early, and the Tigers are yet high on each, but initial returns aren’t inspiring.
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It’s especially glaring that the 2017 crop has been so tepid when 2017 produced upper-tier talent, some of which already is dazzling: Wander Franco (Rays), and Julio Rodriguez (Mariners). Others from 2017: Ronny Mauricio, George Valera, Ezequiel Tovar — all were signed for big-bucks deals. All entered 2022 with heavy presence, promise, or, at the least, potential.
It can be a sobering study, tracking international signings, when as much as scouting it often looks as if a roulette wheel is what most determines a player’s fate and a team’s fortunes.
What the Tigers are attempting to do, what they insist is evolving, is to secure a steadier stream of talented teens who will grow and someday shine. Which, the Tigers might acknowledge, is one way of staving off the kind of offensive malaise blighting MLB’s poorest run-producing team in 2022.
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and retired Detroit News sports reporter.