Puerto Rican baseball needed a miracle, and it got two of them

Before nature flipped Puerto Rico upside down and shook it, before the fields were ruined and the games were cancelled, baseball was in trouble there. The old system made money for people who weren’t Major League Baseball owners, which meant there were going to be changes. The new system made sure almost all of the money stayed with Major League Baseball owners, which was a clear improvement for people who owned a baseball team. It was less advantageous for a Puerto Rican teenager looking to play baseball for a living.

In 1990, Puerto Rican players were folded into the draft, which is a system designed to limit how much money amateur players make. This instantly throttled the money flowing into Puerto Rican baseball, and the financial incentive was removed for adults who wanted to develop baseball players for profit, which meant the burden was placed on public schools. Puerto Rican schools didn’t have an infrastructure that could compete with the high schools and colleges in the contiguous United States, which meant that less talent was getting developed.

Which meant the slow, gradual death of Puerto Rican baseball.

If you want a longer explanation, you can read the New York Times on the subject. If you’re more of a shiny picture-and-chart person, it looks like this:

You can see the peak in the ‘90s, and you can see the crash after that. Once the money was removed for everyone but the highest draft picks, it became harder and harder for amateur players to get the support and development they needed. It was almost a two-front war for Puerto Rican players, with the well-funded institutions of the 50 states on one side, and the countries that were still ruled by buscones and money, like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, on the other. Puerto Rico couldn’t compete with the money or incentives provided by either, and the presence of Puerto Rican players in baseball was threatening to regress toward 1950s levels.

There have been changes, though, and they’re reflected on the back end of the graph. There aren’t any panaceas to be found, but there has been meaningful progress. Here’s a feature centered around Giants prospect Heliot Ramos that explains how Major League Baseball is helping a little bit, trying to undo some of the mess they created. The Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy is trying to close the development gap and return Puerto Rico to its rightful place as a baseball powerhouse. There are more resources being funneled to Puerto Rican baseball now than in the ‘90s and ‘00s, which means there’s a chance for a baseball renaissance there.

It’s probably already begun. That New York Times feature ended with this paragraph, and I can’t get it out of my head:

I think M.L.B. recognizes the problem, and they have every right to include us in the draft,” Bernier said. “It’s their decision, and we have to try to adjust accordingly. But with the way things are, Puerto Ricans are slowly becoming less enthusiastic about baseball, and that can become a vicious cycle.

Specifically, the words “less enthusiastic” keep ringing in my head. If there were a panel convened to fix this problem, a blue-ribbon panel filled with the brightest minds in the baseball world, how would they go about it?

My guess — and my hope — is that the universe already did the heavy lifting for us. Let’s repurpose that graph to fit the thesis:

There’s no way to parse the correlation and the causation perfectly. In a post-Clemente world, were baseball teams more excited to find talent from Puerto Rico, or were Puerto Rican youngsters more excited to play baseball every waking hour of their lives?

Yes. The answer is “yes.”

This chicken-and-egg question probably doesn’t matter. There was an era of Puerto Rican baseball that was defined by Roberto Clemente’s legacy, and that’s not in dispute. He was one of baseball’s greatest gifts, and that goodwill and wonder trickled down to the kids whacking homemade spheroids with homemade cylinders, just as it did with Willie Mays and Babe Ruth.

So if there’s a world in which Puerto Ricans are “slowly becoming less enthusiastic about baseball,” is there a way to get them more enthusiastic?

Yes. The answer is “yes.” And it would look like this:

First, there would have to be an otherworldly talent, the platonic ideal of a baseball player. He would have to be tall, strong, and nearly perfect, with the ability to hit a baseball 450 feet and dive for a ball that was hit 100 MPH to his left. Ideally, he would be so good that he would allow his team to play for an extra couple weeks, or even a full month, every season, when the attention of the baseball world would be partially focused on him.

And then there would need to be another one.

Also, both of these hypothetical players would need to play the same position, if possible.

This is the gift of Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor, the two best shortstops in baseball, each unwittingly competing against the other in that Mays-Mantle, Brett-Boggs, Williams-DiMaggio, and Jeter-Rodriguez-Garciaparra tradition. Baseball needs these sort of manufactured arguments, where multiple players are shoved into the same glass jar and forced to fight, even if they don’t really have anything to do with each other. The best one going right now, though, is Correa and Lindor, the two best players Puerto Rico has produced for a long, long time.

Even better, they both have personalities. They both want to be adored, and they go about it in the best possible way, by being themselves. Correa is a heady, focused supernova of baseball talent, the epitome of what a first-overall pick should be. He’ll make Astros fans laugh and gasp, and he’ll do it all while keeping the proper perspective about what this silly little game really means. He’s a nearly perfect baseball player.

Unless Lindor is even more perfect. His listed nickname on Baseball-Reference.com is “Mr. Smile,” and it almost seems like that’s underselling him. He’s perhaps the best ambassador for the game since Andrew McCutchen and an effervescent personality who’s a human viral marketing stunt for the idea that baseball is fun and exciting.

Consider the odds of these two players, with this much talent, playing the same position at the same time, both with their whole careers ahead of them, and appearing right when Puerto Rico needs them the most. Baseball is a fickle business partner, and so there’s always the chance that these particular players will fall down a Bob Horner hole of unfortunate events. But from here, it looks like two of the greatest players in baseball are both young and from Puerto Rico, and they happen to play the same position. Just like schoolkids argued about Mays and Mantle, so will they argue about Correa and Lindor.

And this is exactly what the sport needs to overcome that strange post-draft malaise that sucked the joy out of baseball for the entire territory.

Now consider that it’s not just Correa and Lindor. There’s also Javier Baez for the aficionados, the player who is just a little rougher, a little rawer, and has the potential to be more exciting than anyone else in baseball. The physical talents are Baez are storied enough to get the internet excited about the way he tags runners. Think about that. Baseball had been around for more than a century before it developed its first player who was worth watching just for how he tagged runners. That Baez can hit for power and run and field is fine and impressive, but it speaks to his skill and balletic acumen that he can tag a runner and make baseball Twitter go bananas. In 10 years, we might be fully aware of how Baez was the best middle infielder of any of his peers.

Or we might have a Mays-Mantle-Snider situation where the Snider kids got a little hosed, but screw that, they were still fans of Duke Snider, an amazing baseball talent, and they didn’t need to apologize for anything, dammit. Baez would be thrilled to be the Snider in this scenario, I’m guessing. Even as he plotted ways to be the Mantle.

This is how baseball will thrive again in Puerto Rico. There will be an acknowledgement from Major League Baseball that their decision to fold Puerto Rican players into the draft came with unintended consequences (check). There will be additional resources allocated to the territory to partially make up for the infrastructure gap between high schools and colleges on the mainland and high schools and colleges in Puerto Rico (check). And there will be something to get potential baseball fans excited on the island in a way that’s hard to explain (check, check, check).

Consider the talent of Pudge Rodriguez, the last Puerto Rican superstar from the pre-draft era. Now pretend that there were two of him. That’s the kind of gift that Puerto Rico has with Correa and Lindor. That’s the kind of gift that we all get to enjoy, and it’s not lost on the world that the timing was perfect.

Hurricane Maria ruined so much, and how the United States responded to it was incalculably disgusting and shameful. The downward trend of Puerto Rican baseball after the draft and the hurricane should have combined to euthanize the sport there. Instead, there’s a growing buzz that might last for generations. Correa, Lindor, and Baez don’t have to be Roberto Clemente to spur the interest of baseball in Puerto Rico, but if they can just be themselves for 10 years or so, they’ll do as much as any targeted program or initiative could have.

Puerto Rico needed players who could make them enthusiastic about baseball again. Here, the universe said. Here are the best possible players for such a thing. The timing was perfect, and the enthusiasm will follow.