Fortune's Tim Arango asks, What will the end of Castro's regime mean for
Major League Baseball?
FORTUNE Magazine
By Tim Arango, Fortune writer
March 30 2007: 10:09 AM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune Magazine) -- The two shortstops, the two hombres who
share a position and a homeland, were scooping up ground balls on a back
field at the Seattle Mariners' training camp in Peoria, Ariz., one
morning last month, taking turns gliding to the ball and firing to first
base. The efficient spectacle that is a Major League Baseball batting
practice session buzzed around them, balls zipping point to point:
pitcher to batter, batter to outfield, fielder to first baseman.
The upstart and the elder statesman, Yuniesky Betancourt and Rey
Ordóñez, fled communist Cuba a decade apart for the chance to offer
their labors to the highest bidder. Ordóñez, back in 1993, hopped into
an idling red Cadillac outside a dormitory in Buffalo, where the Cuban
national team was playing in a tournament, and was whisked to the free
market. Betancourt, in 2003, left Cuba in a 28-foot Baja speedboat bound
for the Florida Keys, a journey that should have taken four to six hours
but lasted four days because of an unplanned stopover at a Bahamian
beach to evade the U.S. Coast Guard. He was left with a satellite phone
and told to wait for another boat. The only thing to eat was coconuts.
morales_dominguez.ap.03.jpg
Dominguez, right, speaks of Morales' chances of playing professional
baseball in the U.S. during a news conference Friday, July 21, 2000, at
a restaurant in Miami's Little Havana area.
yuniesky_betancourt.ap.03.jpg
Seattle Mariners' Yuniesky Betancourt runs toward third base on a single
by teammate Ichiro Suzuki in the fifth inning of an MLB baseball game,
Monday, May 22, 2006, in Seattle. Betancourt, who singled earlier,
scored later in the inning.
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From the Island to the Show
The journey from Cuba to the big leagues is truly a long, strange trip.
Here are five of the most prominent defectors:
Rene Arocha
The first defector to make the big leagues, he left in 1991. In Miami
one night after playing in a tournament in Tennessee, Arocha missed the
flight back to Havana. He pitched three years for the Cardinals and one
for the Giants.
Rey Ordóñez
In 1993, while his teammates ate lunch before a game in Buffalo, the
shortstop jumped into a car driven by a Miami radio executive. Playing
for the Mets in 1999, he set a record by going 100 straight errorless
games. This spring he was training with the Mariners.
Livan Hernandez
Two years after getting into an agent's car when the Cuban national team
was visiting Monterrey, Mexico, Hernandez won the Most Valuable Player
trophy in the 1997 World Series pitching for the Florida Marlins. He
currently plays for the Diamondbacks.
Ariel Prieto
The pitcher got a visa to visit his father in-law in Florida and played
six years before retiring in 2001. Unfamiliar with the logistics of
capitalism, he slipped his $1.2 million bonus check from the Oakland A's
into his jeans pocket - then ran his jeans through the wash.
Orlando Hernandez
Livan's half-brother, Orlando was banned from Cuban baseball because
officials were worried he'd defect - which he did, reaching the Bahamas
on a raft in 1997. Ten months later he saved the Yankees' season. He now
plays for the Mets.
"I was really scared in the middle of the sea, and everything was pitch
black, and I remember not knowing if I would ever make it," Betancourt,
flanked by his interpreter, third-base coach Carlos Garcia, said in
front of his locker in the Mariners' clubhouse after the morning
workout. "I just wanted to get out of the boat and get on land."
Betancourt will tell his story in a federal courthouse in Key West,
where his and Ordóñez's former agent is on trial for allegedly smuggling
baseball players out of Cuba. The agent, Gustavo "Gus" Dominguez, is a
Cuban American who in the 1990s fled Fidel Castro's regime - a shadowy
line of work that involved trailing the Cuban national team to
international tournaments and plying young ballplayers with promises of
riches.
Barring a last-minute plea deal, Dominguez will go on trial on 52 counts
of alien smuggling and other immigration violations. The maximum penalty
would be decades in prison - ten years per person illegally brought to
the U.S. - but it's more likely that Dominguez, the first baseball agent
to be charged with alien smuggling, would face three to five years if
found guilty, says a source close to the case. Three others charged in
the case, including Betancourt's boat driver, have already pleaded guilty.
Immigrant entrepreneurs ignite economy
The United States' policy towards Cuban migrants holds that any Cuban
who reaches America's shores is given asylum, but those intercepted at
sea are repatriated - a policy known as "wet foot/dry foot." The policy
has created an underground recruiting opportunity for Dominguez and
others. Now, as Castro lies ill, the case spotlights a hot- button issue
for baseball: the explosive potential of Cuban talent if it were
unleashed on the major leagues.
Consider: In 2006, 159 players born in the Dominican Republic, a country
with a population of 9.2 million, appeared in major league games. Cuba,
with a population of 11.4 million, is just as baseball crazy and has a
much more sophisticated structure to groom young players - a relic of
the days when the Soviet Union helped fund programs to produce
worldclass athletes. Yet only nine Cuban-born players appeared in
big-league games last year.
"Interest in Cuba for playing Major League Baseball has never been
higher," says Joe Kehoskie, an agent who has represented about 15 Cuban
defectors. He believes there could be 25 to 50 players in Cuba ready to
step into the big leagues on short notice. with the average MLB salary
at $2.7 million per season, he figures "there could be up to half a
billion dollars worth of Cuban players right now. An open Cuba would
change the face of Major League Baseball in three to five years."
But ballplayers don't have an excess of time. "Cuban ballplayers are
desperate to get out of Cuba," says Roberto González Echevarría, a Yale
professor and author of The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban
Baseball. "The passage of time is much more poignant for ballplayers. If
Dominguez wants to help them get out, I'm in favor of it."
Blowing the whistle on illegals
Fittingly, the government's investigation into Dominguez began near a
ballpark. On Sept. 22, 2005, the Chicago White Sox lost to the Minnesota
Twins, 4--1. Ysbel Medinasantos, a former truck driver who made his
money in real estate and drug trafficking in Florida, had planned to
attend the game as the guest of an unnamed White Sox player. He never
made it to the ballpark. Instead he was arrested by a DEA agent near the
Embassy suites in downtown Chicago and shipped back to Pensacola, Fla.,
to answer drug charges. During his interrogation he offered prosecutors
a chip: information on Dominguez in exchange for leniency on the drug
charges. He now sits in the Federal Detention Center in Miami waiting to
testify that he organized the smuggling operations at the behest of
Dominguez.
According to prosecution documents, Medina-Santos received two wire
transfers of $50,000 each from an account at Commercial Capital Bank in
the name of Henry Blanco, the Venezuelan-born backup catcher for the
Chicago Cubs and a client of Dominguez's firm. Prosecutors believe that
the money was funneled through Blanco's account without his knowledge
and used to pay for Betancourt's boat ride. (Betancourt's journey is not
part of the criminal charges, but the prosecution plans to introduce it
to demonstrate prior bad acts.) Another $125,000 was allegedly funneled
through Blanco's account to fund the two operations that are the subject
of the indictment. One, in July of 2004, was intercepted by the Coast
Guard. The second, the following month, succeeded in smuggling five
Cuban ballplayers to the Florida Keys. Two of them are currently toiling
in the minor leagues, for the Atlanta Braves and Arizona Diamondbacks.
(None of the players are in legal trouble themselves.)
When a Cuban ballplayer decides to defect, he must deal with two sets of
arbitrary rules: The U.S. wet foot/dry foot policy and Major League
Baseball's regulations on the signing of foreign players. Like the
immigration policy, MLB's stance toward Cubans is sui generis: Any Cuban
player who comes to the U.S. is deemed a resident and placed in the
amateur draft. All other foreign players are free agents, which means
they can sign with the highest bidder.
For this reason, agents representing Cuban defectors try to shuffle them
off to third countries, such as Mexico or Costa Rica, to gain residency
there and apply for free-agent status. Betancourt, prosecutors believe,
was supplied with a fraudulent Mexican passport by Dominguez and driven
to Tijuana, where he boarded a plane for Mexico City. He was busted with
the fake passport and spent three weeks in a Mexican jail before being
released. He eventually made his way back to the U.S. and to free agency.
The alleged smuggling operations do not appear to have been good
business for Dominguez. soon after returning to the U.S., Betancourt had
a new agent, and Dominguez, according to a source, never "got a dime"
from the shortstop's $3.65 million contract with the Mariners. In August
2005 the agent filed a grievance with the Major League Baseball players
Association seeking money from Betancourt. He has sued two other players
that he allegedly helped flee Cuba.
Dominguez, who is described as a family man and has a son and daughter
who attend college together, declined to be interviewed. his Encino,
Calif., agency, Total Sports International, is still in business, and
Dominguez made the rounds of spring training camps this year.
In a statement, Dominguez's attorney, Susan Dmitrovsky, said: "Gus
Dominguez is a hard-working, law-abiding citizen who has diligently made
opportunities available for young men to showcase their baseball talent.
The United States is and must remain a vanguard for those seeking
freedom and democracy. Mr. Dominguez has done his part to advance that
American heritage through lawful means."
Dominguez fell into the baseball representation business in 1991. The
Cuban national team was staying the night in Miami on its way back to
Havana after playing in an exhibition series in Millington, Tenn. René
Arocha, a left-handed pitcher, never made the flight, becoming the first
Cuban player to defect to the U.S. - a story chronicled by the writers
Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez in their book The Duke of Havana. As the
story goes, a Miami radio executive who knew Arocha referred him to
Dominguez, who at that time owned a marketing business. After failing to
persuade the Beverly Hills Sports Council - which represented the
Cuban-American slugger Jose Canseco - to sign Arocha as a client,
Dominguez took on the job himself.
Dominguez, depending on whom one asks, is either a fighter for freedom,
shuttling the oppressed from their homeland to get fair market value for
their skills, or, as the prosecution will argue, simply a man looking to
make a buck. He has his backers in the baseball community. "It's a heck
of an issue because you have guys that want to play baseball and follow
their dreams," says Oneri Fleita, a Cuban American who is the director
of player development for the Chicago Cubs. "They get on rafts and risk
their life. That's what our country is about, living the dream."
As for Betancourt, he says of Dominguez: "I don't know what his business
was, but I really appreciate what he did for me. He took me off the island."
As the new season gets under way, Betancourt will try to improve his
deficient .310 on-base percentage - the statistic du jour for measuring
a player's offensive prowess. This week he'll take a break and fly to
Key West to give his testimony. And depending on what happens there, the
man who took him off the island could see his own freedom imperiled.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/29/magazines/fortune/Cuban_game.fortune/index.htm?section=money_latest
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