This is a couple days old, but here’s an interesting piece about a couple players from the Dominican Republic who are clearly close to major league ready, but who can’t come to the United States for spring training due to their involvement in a marriage fraud scandal in 2004.
On Jan. 30, Omar Beltre, a tremendously talented Texas Rangers prospect, loaded his car for the biggest assignment of his career.
A day earlier, Aguilas, one of two teams from the Dominican Republic to qualify for the prestigious Caribbean Series, added the 26-year-old right-hander to its roster.
Rangers general manager Jon Daniels, visiting the team’s Dominican player academy, walked delicately across the complex’s gravel parking lot toward Beltre bearing bad news.
Daniels spoke to Beltre quietly for a few moments. Then Beltre dropped his equipment bag and began to cry.
Thirty players were involved in the scandal, which involved the men agreeing to marry Dominican women so they could get entry into the U.S. Most Dominicans that sign with U.S. teams are automatically given work visas. The players were paid $3,000 for their participation.
The problems for Beltre and Ogando started when they went to the U.S. embassy in January 2005 to pick up their work visas. According to the Rangers’ information, consulate officials soon discovered an inordinate number of young minor league ballplayers had been married in a short period of time to women who had previously been denied visas. It raised red flags.
When the players went back to pick up their work visas, consulate officials were waiting.
“They said, ‘Just tell us the truth,’ ” Ogando recalled. “They told me, ‘You may lose your career because of this, so right now you might as well come clean.’ “
Beltre reportedly throws a 97 mph fastball and kept a 2.03 ERA in the Dominican Winter League. Ogando can top 100 mph on radar guns.
It’s a little surprising the Rangers brass, which includes well-connected owner Republican Tom Hicks, haven’t finagled a deal for these guys.
You can read the rest of the article here.
(Via Baseball Think Factory)
2 responses so far ↓
1 Gary Garland // Mar 22, 2008 at 10:53 am
One of the new Chunichi signees, Maximo Nelson, is a Dominican who was caught in a false marriage scam in the U.S. and he can no longer enter the country. Nelson was a former Yankees minor leaguer. He has made noises in the Japanese press about becoming a Japanese citizen at some point, but we’ll have to see about that.
Unfortunately, with the desperate poverty in the D.R., players are vulnerable to a lot of scams from local hustlers on the fringes of baseball. Some Dominican players have even taken veterinary level steroids in hopes of impressing scouts, for example.
Since the D.R. is a source of cheap labor for MLB, there is no incentive for Selig and crew to really crackdown on all this. Instead, they wait to be embarrassed by U.S. authorities when these things surface during investigations.
2 Shinsano // Mar 23, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Yeah, I get the feeling if fans really knew how much this sort of scam, or others like it, went on in that part of the baseball world that people would be turned off. I’m a little skeptical of how Selig deals or doesn’t deal with it as well.
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