Buscones = Crooked Searchers?

As I was thinking about the young baseball players in the Dominican Republic, I became interested in what the term ‘buscones’ translated to in English. First, I asked a coworker who is fluent in Spanish, but he had not ever heard or used the word. After perusing the Internet for a few minutes I found a couple of translations. The first one I found translated to ‘crooked.’ The second one I found translated to ‘searchers.’ If you were to put the two definitions together, I suppose that there is an accurate description of the men who run these programs in the Dominican Republic. They are always in search of finding or creating the next best baseball player to come from their country. When they discover the player, then they become crooked, or corrupt, in a sense that they take 35 percent of the player’s signing bonus.

To answer the question of development versus exploitation is tricky, in my opinion. Taking such a high percentage of the player’s money is gross exploitation. However, it is not as concrete as to whether the buscones methods of creating a great ballplayer is exploitation. In the United States, every summer a large number of hopefuls put their skills on display and try out for various travel league baseball teams. To most of us, this is very common and we would never think negatively about the situation. When this same thing happens in the Dominican Republic, people all of a sudden say that the children are being exploited. These prospective Major League Baseball players go through drills for pro scouts. Potentially hundreds of players will be there to try out. So what some people are calling exploitation, the United States calls the NFL combine. One of the perceptions is wrong because essentially the same thing is taking place in two different countries. The only difference is that in one, it is perfectly acceptable, and in the other, it is morally wrong.

The basic premise of the mass tryouts and the buscones does not bother me a ton. The two parts that I have an issue with are when the buscones take such a large sum of money from these kids and when MLB pays the Dominican players on a lower scale simply because they are not from the U.S. The players may not care right at first because the money is still much greater than what they would have in their home country, but if they work in the United States they should be treated fairly.

As a final side note, I felt Sandy Alderson was a tremendous jerk on the Outside the Lines episode. He had such a sense of superiority and would not even pronounce buscones correctly. He said it in very Americanized way that, to me, showed he refused to respect the culture when the word had been spoked correctly numerous times around him.