Today’s Baseball Fun Quiz ...
Has MLB Turned Its Back On Puerto Rico?
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What do these players have in common?
Roberto Clemente
Carlos Beltrán
Roberto Alomar
Iván Rodríguez
Orlando Cepeda
If you knew all five were born in Puerto Rico, you win the kewpie doll.
Of course, all five have been great major leaguers. But as Jorge Castillo points out The New York Times, the talent well in Puerto Rico seems to have all but dried up, along with general interest in baseball ...
Four years after being forced to cancel an entire season, the league has only four teams. And for the first time in its history, which dates to 1938, the Puerto Rican Baseball League does not have a team based in San Juan, the capital.
The league’s struggles are merely the most vivid manifestation of a more profound, and surprising, phenomenon playing out here: the decline of baseball in a place where it was long considered the primary pastime, if not a religion. After decades of populating major league rosters with All-Stars at every position, Puerto Rico had only 20 players on Major League Baseball rosters on opening day last season. Only two made the All-Star team. (By contrast, the 1997 All-Star Game included eight Puerto Ricans.)
--snip--
No one here disputes the diminished stature of baseball in Puerto Rico, and most agree on the culprit: Major League Baseball’s decision, in 1990, to include Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, in its first-year player draft. This means Puerto Rican players must wait until they have completed high school to sign a professional contract, and then they are going up against players from the United States and Canada in the draft.
Perhaps more important, major league teams have less incentive to cultivate talent in Puerto Rico because those players may end up with another team through the draft.
Well, yes. You’re not going to spend much money if you don’t think you’re buying a competitive advantage. If every team has the same shot at drafting the same players, it would be foolish for a particular team to outspend another to develop players, as they do in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Or even to spend anything at all.
Essentially, the clubs are spending nothing at all right now. They’ve got a few scouts, but according the Times article they’re not even bothering to scout much of the rural areas of Puerto Rico. Major League Baseball does financially support a Puerto Rican baseball academy, to the tune of $400,000 last year ... or $75,000 per team, which is essentially the same as $0 per team.
Still, I’m missing something. Supposedly there aren’t as many great young Puerto Rican players because of the draft, which presumably has limited teams’ investments in pre-draft talent ... But are there fewer great young players because teams aren’t training them before they’re draft-eligible? Or are there fewer great young players because there aren’t as many young players, generally? And if the latter, why? Weren’t there great young players in Puerto Rico before there were academies? Were there academies in Puerto Rico before 1990? Weren’t there plenty of great young players in the Dominican Republic before teams opened academies?
The main argument, I think, is that because players in Puerto Rico are subject to the draft, they don’t make as much money when they sign. Which lessens the incentive to work hard enough to get a professional contract.
I don’t know. Maybe that makes sense. Something seems to have changed, and none of the other explanations I’ve seen make any more sense than that one.
And one might reasonably ask, “Who cares?”
It’s unlikely that Major League Baseball’s fans could ever notice the overall drop in quality resulting from a paucity of great Puerto Rican players. Especially if the money that was going to Puerto Rico is simply going somewhere else, to develop other great players. MLB has presumably lost some fans in Puerto Rico ... but Puerto Rico’s population is roughly the same as Oklahoma’s, with a per capita income well below the lowest of the 50 United States.
All of which is why Major League Baseball’s not pouring money into Puerto Rico.
Of course, one could make all the same arguments for not pouring money into the Dominican Republic, if Dominicans are added to the amateur draft as MLB reportedly would prefer. Would just as many kids play baseball if they couldn’t get six-figure bonuses upon turning 16? Would teenagers develop their skills exactly as much if all 30 of MLB’s franchises weren’t running academies in the Republic?
I don’t know. What’s happened in Puerto Rico doesn’t lead one to optimism. But again, perhaps MLB simply doesn’t care; as long as there are enough players to populate professional baseball -- and there will always be more than enough players for that -- maybe MLB simply doesn’t care how good those players are.
As a fan, I would like to see as much talent in the major leagues as possible. But I’m sure that the great majority of baseball fans wouldn’t notice if the overall talent level dropped off by 10 percent. And I’m not sure I would notice, either.
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