Waiting on a dream

SAN PEDRO DE MACORIS, Dominican Republic — With the quickly rising sun and glaring heat, today began like any other day of this steamy summer.

But here in this city known as the mecca of baseball in the Dominican Republic, today is unlike any other day. Today is a day when dreams are made, when amateur ballplayers become professionals, gaining entrance to the legendary "academies" run by Major League Baseball franchises in the Dominican Republic. 

Today is July 2.  

July 2, or International Signing Day, is the day that players who turned 16 after August of the previous year are eligible to sign. Jean Carlos Batista, Miguel Angel Sano, their trainers and families — the principal characters in GlobalPost’s “Dominican Dreams” series — have been waiting for today for years.

Today should be the day when the innumerable hours of stretching, running, catching grounders, hitting during batting practice, sweating under a relentless Dominican sun pay off.  In recent years, targeting these extraordinary 16-year-olds has become a growing trend. Teams reserve their biggest signing bonuses — which can reach over $1 million — for this hallowed day, and players, their families and their agents have come to expect them.  

There is a hardball, business side to this rite of summer, and today and over the next few days it all plays out. Approximately 10 percent of all the players in MLB — or about 900 young men — hail from this tiny island in the Caribbean. A quarter of all the players in the minor leagues in North America are also Dominican. So we’re talking about an export industry of baseball that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year in contracts.

But it looks like Batista and his trainer Astin Jacobo, Jr. will have to wait another day before Batista can reach his dream “to get to the Major Leagues and stay there.”

The two are carrying on business as usual — Jacobo running practice for his 40-odd other players, cell phone in hand, waiting for a call that might seal a deal. Batista — who is resting for a few days and wearing streets clothes — also has a cell phone out, but he’s using his to listen to downloads of Reggaeton, the music from the streets here that blends reggae and Latin pop. He says his first call will be to his mother when and if he has news about a signing deal.

Part of the process is establishing and verifying the age of the recruits. They must be 16 and some players and trainers have tried to game the system. Jacobo, Batista’s trainer, is sure that when the news comes, it will be good for what he calls his “true 16-year-old” shortstop. He even went to the hospital in La Romana where Batista was born earlier this week to double-check Batista’s birth certificate, for his own peace of mind.

His prudence will hopefully pay off today in a market where players’ ages are of paramount importance. Questions about players’ ages and past discoveries of falsification have led the MLB office in the Dominican to establish an investigation process. Teams are technically allowed to sign a player while the investigation is still under way, however some teams may be hesitant to do so

Like Batista, Miguel Angel Sano is also waiting for a call.

While many think of today as the ultimate ending to a childhood dream, Jacobo reveals a different take on signing on July 2: “We’re taking July the 2 as the deadline, but it’s the starting line.” 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This spring and summer, GlobalPost has been covering the big-money, high-pressure rite of passage that takes place every year in the Dominican Republic’s baseball academies. This is the latest dispatch  in "Dominican Dreams," a continuing series of video and written dispatches from the Dominican Republic by Casey Beck and Trevor Martin, who are there working on a feature documentary.

This story was updated to clarify the process for signing a player while an investigation into his age is still under way.