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By Barry Svrluga
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 21, 2006



PIZARRETE, Dominican Republic The face of the Washington Nationals' presence
in Latin America dodges gaping potholes on rock-strewn roads in his gleaming
Cadillac Escalade. He lives with his family of eight in a rusting, corrugated
tin shack with sheets for doors between the rooms, keeps a pig on a rope
steps from his front stoop and has a father who says the $1.4 million signing
bonus his 17-year-old son received has changed the family's life un poco -- a
little.

"My life's been the same," said Esmailyn Gonzalez, still wearing his
Nationals warmup jersey hours after a workout earlier this week. "The only
thing is, we're just a lot more comfortable."

Here, with the La Roche mountains as a backdrop beyond the nearby sugar cane
fields and a stove that's nothing more than an overturned barrel with a fire
atop it, comfort is relative, hope abundant and Gonzalez potentially the next
poor Dominican kid to make it in baseball. His story is both wildly
unexpected and oddly typical in this country of about 9 million people, where
baseball has long been the most obvious way to pull families from poverty to
luxury.

"That's what I want," Gonzalez said in Spanish, flashing the white teeth that
have Nationals officials calling him "Smiley." "Better for my family."

Gonzalez, a shortstop, is in such a position to provide all this -- including
renovating a new home some 2 1/2 miles away, where men lay tile and grin at
their teenage employer's arrival -- as a direct result of the renegade system
in which major league teams procure Dominican players. The system became so
unwieldy that, six years ago, Major League Baseball established an office in
Santo Domingo, the capital, to help provide structure, a commodity that has
proved hard to obtain.

"Officially, we do not have jurisdiction over these people," said Ronaldo
Peralta, the director of MLB's Latin American office. "There is only so much
we can do."

Foreign teenagers aren't subject to MLB's annual draft, which includes only
American high schoolers and college kids. Rather, they are all but auctioned
off to teams by street agents known locally as buscones, a derivative of the
Spanish for "to find" or "to seek." The process, which Nationals President
Stan Kasten has likened to doing business in "the wild, wild West," involves
Dominican baseball men -- part coaches, part providers, part hustlers, part
financial advisers -- identifying and cultivating talent, preparing the
players for tryouts and then selling them in the July following their 16th
birthdays to the highest-bidding major league teams. Depending on the
arrangement, the buscones end up with anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the
signing bonuses -- except in the countless instances in which they rip off an
illiterate and unsuspecting family.

"We do a good job for baseball," said Basilio Vizcaino, Gonzalez's
42-year-old street agent and a former minor league player for the Oakland
Athletics. "The players are better prepared when they sign. And then, [the
clubs] also don't have any other options."

It is a reality into which major league franchises delve in order to tap the
Latin American market, which has become essential to assembling a potent
roster. In 2006, more than one in 10 players on Opening Day were Dominican.
The Nationals, though, are just reentering the market after a nearly
three-year period of dormancy, and the signing of Gonzalez is their way of
announcing their newfound aggression.

"We're here to play," scouting director Dana Brown said.

They will play, however, in a system that is fraught with peril, with
buscones whispering to a kid that they can get them a paycheck immediately if
they leave another agent, sometimes telling a family they'll take, say, 20
percent of the signing bonus while writing a contract that gives them 50
percent. Still, major league team officials say there is no getting around it.

"I hate to say it, I hate to admit it: It really do work in [the players']
favor," said Jose Rijo, a native of nearby San Cristobal who pitched 14 years
in the majors and now serves in the Nationals' front office. "Now, we got
kids 13 years old, 14 years old with talent. [The buscones] feed them, give
them some better instruction, give them a chance to develop every day. If you
go back to the old system, nobody would discover them, nobody would help
them."

Just as with agents in the United States, it would seem that some buscones
would be more trustworthy than others. But Rijo is quick to say, "I don't
trust any of them."

Still, less than an hour after speaking of his distaste, Rijo sat at a table
and dined on rice and beans with Vizcaino. The agent said he received 20
percent of Gonzalez's signing bonus -- or $280,000 -- a typical percentage
for the services he provided, letting Gonzalez stay in his house and offering
him better nutrition and training over a two- to three-year period.

Vizcaino said there are anywhere between 100 to 150 buscones who operate
training camps in the Dominican Republic, each trying to seize the most
talented players and negotiate the most lucrative contracts. The fight for
players is fierce and, sometimes, shady. Buscones have been known to juice
players on steroids in the weeks before a tryout, adding miles per hour to
their fastballs or distance to their home runs.

"And then after you sign them, a guy who was throwing 93 [mph] at a workout
is down to 83," Rijo said, "and you're like, 'What the hell?' "

Vizcaino and other buscones play down the underbelly of their profession, but
they admit there are rivalries among them. Given the amount of money at stake
-- scores of kids are signed each year to lesser bonuses, beginning in the
tens of thousands of dollars -- and a Dominican economy in which citizens
earn an average of roughly $2,400 annually, the pursuit of players is a
booming business. "There's a lot of competition," Vizcaino said, "but there's
not a lot of fighting."

MLB is aware of the pitfalls involved in the system. The league, though, says
it is helpless to do anything directly about it.

"We do have a concern," MLB's Peralta said. "But I have to be honest with
you, and I want to state for the record: Buscones, or independent scouts, are
a very important part of the industry. They help fill a gap, because there's
not a lot of organized baseball in the Dominican Republic. They provide a
service.

"But the sad situation becomes when, like in any other big group of people,
there are some guys -- and I wouldn't say the majority of them, because there
are a lot of hardworking people -- but you will find some bad apples that
have abused the players. We have no jurisdiction over them, but still, those
incidents are the most publicized."

Peralta said his office is working with the Dominican government to help
establish regulations that MLB couldn't enforce itself, including setting
standard percentages buscones can receive from a signing bonus -- 10 percent
if they worked with a kid for a year or less, 15 percent if it's a year or
more. Though President Leonel Fernandez signed the legislation, Peralta said
it had some "points of conflict" with the Dominican Olympic committee and
other politicians, and it is not yet law.

"Basically," Peralta said, "it's out of our hands."

If the system bothers Gonzalez and his family, they don't show it. Sitting in
plastic chairs on the dirt under a tree outside their tin home, set aside a
more proper house belonging to Gonzalez's grandmother, they pass around a
sugar cane stalk whittled with a dull machete, chewing on the sweet pulp and
discussing their lives. Inside a "living room" that can't be more than eight
feet long and six feet wide, Gonzalez fiddles with his Soundmaster III
three-disc changer stereo, another new addition, and talks about training
roosters "to fight, and when they lose, to eat," he said.

Gonzalez's father, Daniel, has the same soft features as his son, the same
easy manner. He understands that $1.4 million will alter his family's life --
providing for the rebuilding of the new home, the Escalade, the hope. Yet he
argues that his son, now with expectations and money he didn't have just six
months ago, hasn't changed.

"Mentally," Daniel Gonzalez said through an interpreter, "it's like the same."

That, Rijo said, is why he believes Esmailyn Gonzalez will make it. During a
morning workout, Gonzalez showed a slick glove and a bat that produced far
more line drives than popups. Brown, Washington's scouting director who saw
Gonzalez before the Nationals beat out the Texas Rangers to sign him in July,
said he was immediately drawn to Gonzalez's disciplined approach at the
plate, his ability as a switch hitter, his defensive skills and his long-term
potential to hit for power.

Rijo, though, is most impressed with another tool: his head. After he signed
for his riches, Gonzalez asked Rijo how to spend his money, and the former
pitcher said he had to buy a house before a car, "because no matter how many
cars you have, if you don't have a good garage, you'll regret it." So the
building on the Gonzalezes' new place began before the Escalade was purchased.

"That's why I'm so high on him: his attitude," Rijo said. "It's not the
tools. It's how he handles himself. He's not a typical Dominican kid."

The typical Dominican kid won't travel to Florida for spring training or
spend his summer in the minor leagues, as Gonzalez is scheduled to do. The
typical Dominican kid, Rijo said, doesn't talk as much about his family.

Outside his new, unfinished house, Gonzalez was offered a chance to join Rijo
at his seaside home for lunch of fish stew and plantains. Gonzalez, though,
politely declined, preferring to return to his family's shack. With that, he
hopped in his Escalade, turned up the stereo and headed off, certain a better
life -- and the major leagues in Washington -- lay somewhere beyond the rocky
road beneath his tires.