Major League Baseball Won’t Let Kids Be Kids
A look at the international amateur market and its treatment of young athletes
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . The 2023 American League MVP Shohei Ohtani and National League MVP Ronald Acuña, Jr. were each signed as international free agents. This was only the second time since the advent of the draft that both MVP winners were international signees.
. . . The first time it happened was in 1998, when Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs took home the NL MVP and the Texas Rangers’ Juan Gonzalez won the AL MVP.
Leading Off
MLB Won’t Let Kids Be Kids
By Daniel R. Epstein
My oldest child became a teenager a few weeks ago. He reminds us of this constantly by referring to himself as “The Teenager,” but also indirectly in the parenting decisions my wife and I have to make now. Is he old enough to meet a friend at the pizza shop down the street or to watch The Godfather? Can we trust him on social media? How soon should we have “the talk?”
These are normal decisions that all parents must make as their kids grow older, and none of them have the right answer. You just have to know your child and do the best you can, acknowledging that you’re going to make mistakes along the way and trusting that you’ve prepared them well enough overall that they’ll overcome them.
What isn’t normal is a child younger than my son weighing an offer from the Philadelphia Phillies that will decide the next 10-20 years of his life.
If Kenny Acuña isn’t eligible to officially sign with an MLB team until the 2028 signing period, that means he’s a 12-year-old child right now. I will refer to him as a child and not a ballplayer because this important distinction appears to have been ignored by almost all parties involved. That’s why there’s a rule against agreeing to future contracts with children under 16. It would be a good rule—if it wasn’t habitually flouted—to protect against child trafficking, primarily of kids from developing Latin American nations.
To be clear, I don’t blame young Kenny or the Acuña family. If it’s his dream to play baseball, he has little choice. MLB teams and the controlling buscónes—the trainers who prepare kids to sign baseball contracts in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, usually taking up to a quarter of their signing bonus—force children and families to make these decisions if they want to have a chance at playing professionally. Jeff Passan wrote about the problem at ESPN in 2019:
“The best players in the Dominican Republic often drop out of school as young as 10 and 11 to start training for baseball careers. The increasingly early age at which players agree to sign—which is against MLB's rules that are rarely enforced—has incentivized the use of performance-enhancing drugs on children in hopes that their mature-looking bodies will impress scouts enough to offer significant signing bonuses. While the agreements are non-binding, teams fear that breaking a deal would have harsh repercussions with the buscónes who control the talent pipeline that accounts for nearly 30 percent of major league players and closer to half of minor leaguers.”
The Acuñas are atypical because Ronald is an MVP in the middle of a $100 million contract, so the family is wealthy. In most cases, the buscónes prey on children from impoverished upbringings with MLB’s complicity. If the kids and parents don’t comply as preteens, they have little or no hope of playing professional baseball.
What makes matters worse is that the majority of kids who are consigned to buscónes never sign a professional contract. They spend their formative years in a baseball training facility instead of going to school and having age-appropriate activities, then get cast aside as teenagers when they don’t make it. If you’re 16 or 17 and you quit school at 11 to play a sport that no longer wants you, what do you do?
A commonly proposed solution is an international draft, but that only exchanges one set of problems for another. A draft takes away the players’ agency entirely and artificially restricts their earnings by tying it to a draft slot rather than letting them market their services to the highest bidder. It’s bad enough that MLB caps their earnings with international bonus pools that prevent any team from spending more than $7.1 million (though some pool allotments can be traded). The last amateur who signed in a free market was Yoan Moncada, who received a $31.5 million bonus from the Boston Red Sox in 2015. A draft would be a cudgel for billionaires to take even more money away from the players and their families.
There isn’t a great way to solve this problem other than by MLB enforcing its own rules and refusing to let teams negotiate with buscónes about children before they turn 16. Unfortunately, the league has never let ethics get in the way of business before, and they aren’t about to start doing it now. That means the league will continue to treat 12-year-olds like Kenny Acuña as assets and commodities instead of letting them be children. Shame on them all.
Daniel R. Epstein is a co-director of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America. His writing can be found at Baseball Prospectus and Forbes SportsMoney.
Extra Innings
In November of 2017, MLB took its harshest action against a team regarding violations of the international market. The Atlanta Braves were stripped of 13 players, had limits put on international signings for multiple seasons, and saw multiple team employees face bans from the game.
From that group of 13 players, six seasons later, only three of the players have ever reached the major leagues - Ji Hwan Bae, Livan Soto, and Guillermo Zuñiga. None has spent a full season with the major league club, though Bae came close last season, spending just two weeks in the minors before spending the rest of the season with the Pirates as a backup infielder/outfielder.