Starlin Castro's Recruitment

Right now, most teams have baseball academies in the Dominican Republic (and some in Venezuela) that train and educate boys. The teams expect in return that they’ll first crack at signing the best of them. If another team could just draft the best players that you developed, teams would close up shop on the academies pretty quickly.

The talent pool that used to come out of Puerto Rico has dried up since the draft was extended to the island. Puerto Rico believes that extending the draft has had a disastrous effect on the state of baseball on the island.

Would you make separate rules for international and domestic players in the same draft? Because there is no way that the schools would stand for American kids getting drafted at 16. Conversely, having Dominican players wait until they are 18 to be drafted would stunt their development as well as cause the top prospects to sign with Japan.

MLB would love to have an international draft because the draft really only serves one purpose—to limit the bonuses paid out to amateur players. No where is this more evident than with Aroldis Chapman, who got $30 million to sign with the Reds whereas Stephen Strasburg, the superior prospect, got only half that. But the reality of the situation is that while guys like Chapman, Sano and Ynoa get big headlines for their huge signing bonuses, most foreign players sign cheap—a lot cheaper than American players do. It doesn’t really cost a lot to be competitive in developing and signing foreign players. You could do it for $6-7 million—the price of a mediocre free agent.

The bottom line is that while MLB would like an international draft to cut the bonuses paid to guys like Chapman, they’ve never found a way to do it that would be fair to the teams and wouldn’t close down all the academies.