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.
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Great article!
ReplyDeleteI especially like the way you introduced the topic. "Lost in translation" happens all the time, so it's usually difficult to translate both precisely and elegantly, or even better, funny. You really did a good job in translating the word Buscones!
You were right in pointing out that "essentially the same thing is taking place in two different countries," but I don't think this necessarily means that one of the perception is wrong. After all, different people have different perception about things.
So maybe we should ask, "what makes their views different?" Or, if you hold the idea that taking such a high percentage of the player’s money is gross exploitation, "what makes American people take a gross exploitation as 'perfectly acceptable?'"
One explanation is that, these "crooked searchers" have their own skills and resources. By searching talented players and matching them with proper teams, they do create huge values.
Another explanation might be, although the value they created do not match with the huge amount they put in their pockets, (does it remind you of the bankers, brokers and lawyers on Wall Street?) however, because we cannot do without them, we have to put up with the exploitation. And as time goes on, people get use to the exploitation, and take it as "the way it should be."
That was a good idea to search for the meaning of the term "buscones" in Spanish. It is interesting to me that someone who speaks Spanish was not familiar with it. Then again, you did a good job of cobbling together a definition, using the notions of "crooked" and "searcher." Although I did not think about it until after class, it occurred to me that lawyers who try personal injury cases in the U.S. do something very similar to what the buscones do. When someone cannot afford to pay a lawyer on an hourly rate, lawyers often charge between 33 and 40% to settle a case. The higher percentage is if the case must go to trial (I know about this from first-hand experience after having an accident in California). At the time, I did not think of it as exploitation until a friend of mine (who became a lawyer) said that it was. Now that I think of it, how much interest do credit cards take--sometimes upward of 22-30%. Is that exploitation too?
ReplyDeleteIn the case of young players from the Dominican Republic, I also see it as being somewhat like those high school basketball players who go to college for a year (more like a semester) in order to go to the NBA ('one and done'). But your comparison to the NFL combine is also a good one. In fact, when they talked about buscones training the players to do well in drills or try-outs, rather than playing games, I thought about the combines too. Interesting comparisons!