The Dominican baseball machine signs children at 11 — and a fixer showed how the system protects valuable players

ProPublica’s investigation into Dominican baseball is excellent and unexpectedly revealing. Major League Baseball formally prohibits international signings before age 16, yet teams routinely make informal multimillion-dollar commitments to prospects as young as 11. Poor families then borrow against promised future signing bonuses, leaving them vulnerable to trainers, lenders and middlemen if the deal collapses. The Dominican Republic produces more MLB players than anywhere outside the US, but this pre-signing economy is largely unregulated.

A companion investigation shows the power surrounding valuable prospects. In 2020, Pirates prospect Oneil Cruz crashed into a motorcycle, killing three people. ProPublica obtained court records, bank receipts and interviews showing that a fixer, Santo Caraballo, helped arrange roughly $66,000 in payments to the three victims’ families in exchange for withdrawing civil and criminal claims. Dominican law gives victims considerable influence over whether such prosecutions proceed, so the case disappeared and Cruz’s MLB career continued. Caraballo subsequently became an influential baseball operator.

MLB’s Dominican talent pipeline functions less like a normal youth-sports system than a lightly regulated financial market built around children whose future earning potential can be traded years before they are legally signable.