The Faucet and the Field: How Baseball Drains the Boys Who Play It

There's a thing I've noticed about money in my sixty-some years, which is that it doesn't flow toward where the work is done. It flows toward whoever's standing at the faucet. I've watched this play out in grain markets, in church fundraisers, in the slow politics of who gets to decide where the county road gets paved. And lately I've been watching it play out in professional baseball, which turns out to be a very old story wearing a very clean uniform.

Chamberlain's Bend never produced a professional ballplayer. We did produce a left-handed pitcher named Duane Holmgren, Pastor Holmgren's younger brother, who in 1974 could throw a fastball like he was hanging wallpaper. The Tigers sent a scout to watch him pitch behind Big Earl's grain elevator. Duane got a tryout card. Never called the number on it. Married Darlene Foss that summer and took over his father's dairy operation. I think about Duane sometimes when I read about the Dominican Republic, which sends more ballplayers to the American major leagues than any country outside the United States. Last year, a hundred and forty-four Dominican players reached the majors. Ten percent of the whole league. From a country with roughly the population of Ohio.

Now, the way it works over there is that a kid shows talent, sometimes at eleven or twelve years old, and a trainer spots him. These trainers are called buscones. They run academies where kids get housing, food, and coaching, but not much in the way of schooling. In exchange, when the kid signs with a major league team, the trainer takes thirty-five to fifty percent of the signing bonus.

Let me say that again. Thirty-five to fifty percent. If you hired a man to sell your farm and he kept half the money, you wouldn't call it a commission. You'd call the sheriff. But this is baseball, and these are children, and what's being sold is their futures.

Major league teams have paid out over a billion dollars in signing bonuses to Dominican prospects since 2012. And by the time the money moves through the pipeline, close to half of it gets siphoned off by trainers and lenders before the kid sees a dime.

There's a boy named Belfi Rivera who made a deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks when he was fourteen. The deal was worth one point eight million dollars, payable when he turned sixteen. By the time it settled, the trainer took six hundred and thirty thousand dollars. A moneylender named Santo Caraballo took close to nine hundred and fifty thousand. Belfi Rivera, who did the actual throwing and running and hoping, was left with the remainder of his own contract.

Santo Caraballo, it turns out, had a business partner of some note. David Ortiz. Big Papi. Hall of Famer, Red Sox legend, a man who could hit a baseball so hard it seemed personal. Ortiz says he invested millions into Caraballo's lending operation, but claims his involvement was limited to making loans to trainers, not to kids, and that he ended the relationship when he noticed conduct he considered out of line. There are photographs of him on a private jet with Caraballo, taken on the way to a Bad Bunny concert. You can decide for yourself when the relationship ended.

When Major League Baseball tried to institute an international draft, which would have made these handshake arrangements with children considerably harder to pull off, Ortiz got on the phone. He sent a voice message to Dominican players and trainers declaring a red alert. Said a draft would hurt the Dominican Republic for generations. Told everyone to call the players union and push back hard. He did not mention, in that message, that he had millions of dollars tied up in the system the draft was designed to replace.

Now, I'm not calling David Ortiz a villain. Villains are simple, and this isn't a simple story. What I'm saying is that the faucet doesn't care who's holding it. The money flows the same direction regardless of whether the person at the handle is charming or mean, famous or unknown. Ortiz was standing at the faucet. He did what people at faucets do.

Aunt Vi would say that's the oldest story there is, and she'd be right, and she'd probably also say something about the Lutheran church's building fund that I won't repeat here because Pastor Holmgren reads this column.

The part that sticks with me, the part I keep turning over like a stone in my pocket, is that the draft would have helped. It wasn't a perfect solution. Nothing is. But it would have brought these kids into a system with some rules, some transparency, some floor under what they could lose. The players union killed it. And one of the loudest voices against it belonged to a man who stood to profit from keeping things exactly as they were.

Duane Holmgren never called that number. He milked cows for thirty years and coached Little League on Saturdays and his kids grew up here and his grandkids are here now. I don't know if he made the right choice. I don't know if choice is even the right word for what a nineteen-year-old from Chamberlain's Bend has when a scout hands him a card.

I do know that somewhere in the Dominican Republic there are boys right now who are very, very good at baseball, and that the people closest to them are already doing the math on what that's worth. And I know that the math is not being done in the boys' favor.

The work goes one direction. The money goes another. And the faucet just keeps running.