Jamaica may have the world’s fastest man and West Indies cricket teams may win international championships, but baseball is king in the region when it comes to making money from sport.
Baseball is played around the region, with the greatest activity in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, as well as Puerto Rico. Baseball moves billions of dollars, while cricket, arguably more popular in the West Indies, is wallowing — despite those wins.
The men’s, women’s and under-19s’ cricket teams from the West Indies won the Twenty20 (T20) championships this year. The victories, while impressive, were overshadowed by players’ gripes. The Economist reported that the men’s team is battling with the West Indies Cricket Board over pay, while the women’s team is clamouring for infrastructure.
This is not a problem for baseball, especially in the Dominican Republic where US Major League Baseball (MLB) teams have built state-of-the-art academies and are paying signing fees north of $400,000 to young players to lock them into “farm systems” or academies whose role is to provide experience and training for young players.
The sums are staggering considering that more than 1,000 players are in the academies waiting for a chance to sign with a major league team.
Alan Klein, an anthropologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said: “Six figure signing figures are the norm. These players are groomed and trained until they are sent to the minor leagues and start moving up the ladder.”
MONEY BALL
The 30 MLB teams have training academies in the Dominican Republic, which are “a seamless pipeline into the US leagues,” said Klein, author of the 2014 book Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice. About 10% of players in the MLB are from the Dominican Republic, while the number in the minor leagues is above 20%.
The economic impact comes from the training academics and the service industries created around them, and also from remittances and the signing fees.
Teams sign players in the Dominican Republic on an individual basis, while in countries like Mexico and Venezuela a US team would have to negotiate with a player’s franchise to acquire him, the same way soccer teams trade players.
Chris Daley, a doctoral student at Duke University focusing on baseball in Cuba, said while it is difficult to quantify remittances from baseball players abroad, “they have an important impact on families and the larger community”.
He said Cuba could follow the Dominican Republic’s lead. “What I envision is a system that closely resembles what you see in the Dominican Republic, channelling players into the MLB,” he said.
This is going to take time, however. Cuban players made up fewer than 20 players on the MLB roster on opening day in early April. Cuban players have had to defect in order to join a US team because of the economic embargo.
President Barack Obama’s government has proposed allowing Cuban players to sign with MLB teams, but the embargo would block the option of paying for a player.