Dominican Police Try to Crack Down on Baseball Age Forgery

This week, Dominican police arrested Victor Antonio Baez Garcia, a well-known Major League Baseball talent scout who has been responsible for sending dozens of young players to the US to play baseball. He’s charged with fraud and document forgery—chiefly, the falsification of the players’ ages, which is a common practice in the Dominican Republic.

The younger a player is, generally, the more attractive he is to Major League teams and the more money he can make for the scout who finds him. (Scouts generally receive a portion of players’ signing bonuses.) This leads to a widespread practice of falsifying visas and passports to make the players appear younger on paper. This leads to situations like the one star shortstop Miguel Tejada faced two years ago, when it was revealed he was 33 at the time, not 31 as he claimed to be. Or nine years ago, when Little League World Series ace Danny Almonte turned out to be 14, not 12.

The Dominican Republic says it is cracking down on document forgery, which would be a step on the road to making baseball recruitment in Latin America less corrupt.  That’s going to be a long road, however; there are still plenty of incentives for players--and the agents, scouts and buscones who represent them—to lie about their ages.