Exploitation of Dreams Worse Than PEDs

This is what a pimp does: He procures the use of one human's body -- usually from someone vulnerable for a variety of reasons -- for another human with promises to the former and a price from the latter, and retains much of the profit for himself.

Or, in short, it is what the FBI is investigating major league baseball talent scouts for doing in the Dominican Republic, which on Sunday led to the resignation of Nationals' general manager Jim Bowden.

Baseball appeared hard-pressed to sully itself worse than it did with a generation-long steroids' scandal, in which scores of its players looking to safeguard their careers and lengthen them illegally siphoned drugs meant to help the infirmed live pain-free and longer lives. But if the FBI probe finds what it is looking for now, baseball has, indeed, found a new depth in which to wallow.

After all, what the FBI is looking into is nothing short of human exploitation. This is what Sports Illustrated reported one week ago:

"Two sources inside baseball say that a long-time scout in Latin America, Jorge Oquendo, 47, is the man who links the FBI's investigations of Bowden and his special assistant Jose Rijo to that of former Chicago White Sox senior director of player personnel David Wilder. Last May the White Sox fired Wilder and two Dominican-based scouts after allegations surfaced that they had pocketed money earmarked for player signing bonuses. Oquendo worked for Wilder in 2006 and 2007, as well as for Bowden with the Reds in 1994 and again with the Reds from 2000 through 2003. Oquendo left Cincinnati in 2005, two years after Bowden was fired [as Reds' general manager]."

Every major league team except the Milwaukee Brewers (Bud Selig did do something right) have what they call academies – I think of them more as baseball plantations – in the Dominican Republic to turn young lads into young, and cheap, major league baseball players. It is a general practice for scouts in the Dominican to pay bonuses to prodigious Dominican kids and then introduce them to the major league academies. The FBI is looking into charges those scouts pocketed some of the money meant for the pockets of prospects.

It's an investment system that pays baseball Bernard Madoff-type dividends, what with a Newsday report last Saturday counting 137 of 1,381 active-roster or disabled-list major leaguers on Opening Day 2008, or roughly 10 percent, as Dominican-born. Better still, the paper found 3,356, or a whopping 47.8 percent, of 7,021 minor leaguers under contract then were born outside the United States, mostly in Spanish-speaking countries like the Dominican.

The Dominican is ripe for what the FBI is investigating. It is poor, one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean and among the poorest Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The gap between its rich minority and poor majority is vast and 42 percent of the country lives beneath the poverty line. Most of the wealth is controlled by the minority, white descendants of Spanish slave-holding settlers. Most of the poverty is in the laps of the majority, the first descendents of the African diaspora. The Dominican along with Haiti make up the island of Hispaniola, which at the dawn of the 16th century became the first stop in the transatlantic slave trade.

It is largely the Afro-Dominicans looking to escape poverty who are so aggressively pursued by major league baseball. Baseball is their proverbial ticket off their half of the island. Who knew that their physical talent and determination wouldn't be enough and that they'd have to pay a kickback to get a chance at a better life?

This is, in part, what Gary Sheffield tried to underscore a couple of seasons ago when discussing the falling numbers of black American players like him and the exploding number of Latin players. Sheffield was unsuccessful because his explanation was inarticulate.

What he meant to say wasn't that Latin players are puppets, but that they are more easily exploited by the economics of baseball than are American players because of the dire straits from which they often come and baseball's ability to secure them by the dozens for the same price as one American player. It would take a revolt of the masses to change this system, not unlike the first slave revolt in the Dominican in 1522 against a sugar grower named Don Diego Colon, son of Christopher Columbus.

Or it would take someone slipping up somewhere and being found out. We will learn whether Oquendo, Rijo, Wilder or Bowden, or someone else, was that person.

All have claimed they've done nothing wrong. Bowden told reporters in Florida on Sunday that he was sorry his name was attached to such a despicable story, which has obvious racial overtones. It isn't a story that fits a man who, after taking over the Reds following baseball's exiling of Reds' owner Marge Schott in the early 90s for several racially insensitive incidents, promoted two black men to executive positions with the Reds when black men were still rare in baseball above the clubhouse.

Whether they or someone else is charged and convicted of this heinous activity shouldn't matter in the short run, though. Baseball needs to intervene immediately and insure that nothing of the sort goes on now or in the future. It needs to set up the most-stringent of rules with the most-severe punishment for anyone under its umbrella who dares to deal in such shameful shenanigans.

Steroids' abuse in baseball is disturbing. Preying on poor people whose biggest dream is being part of the game is absolutely disgusting.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a frequent sports opinionist on other outlets. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.