Because this story is going to be misunderstood by 95 percent of people that read it, let’s get the basics out of the way: the Detroit Tigers reached a pre-agreement with 12-year-old Kevin Sosa for a reported $4 million. As crazy as that sounds, Sosa is not the youngest player ever to reach a pre-agreement with an MLB team; sources told ESPN in April that verbal understandings included players as young as 11.
This is not a contract but an “informal” verbal agreement on a future contract that Sosa will sign in four years when he is 16 — these agreements are common, though the $4 million figure is unprecedented for a player of Sosa’s age. These days, they are the backbone of the international signing system, and teams are increasingly willing to make larger bets on younger players to gain an edge.
MLB should overhaul its international system in the next CBA
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “oh my gosh, that should not be allowed! A twelve-year-old should be in school, should be playing outside, hanging out with their friends, not worrying about their professional career!” That’s also what I’m thinking, but that is not how the ugly underbelly of Major League Baseball operates. And it’s certainly worth asking if the system needs a complete overhaul during MLB's looming labor showdown. I sure think it does.
(I am not a scout nor an expert on the international signing ecosystem; if you want an excellent overview of how it all works, I recommend Future Value, a 2020 book by Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen which goes in-depth on scouting and talent identification in MLB; it’s where much of my own understanding comes from.)
The international system is nothing like American amateurs; there is no draft, and much of the talent identification happens with trainers in the Dominican Republic. The vast majority of international prospects come from the DR and Venezuela, and most scouting happens physically in the DR. MLB has rules about when you can sign players and for how much, but they do nothing to change the fundamental nature of what international scouting: gambling on the development of teenagers.
The international scouting system incentivizes this behavior
Agreeing to sign Kevin Sosa for $4 million is a massive risk for the Tigers, and one that could hurt the rest of one of their international classes when such a huge chunk of their limited bonus pool will go to him. But the fact that such a thing is even allowed is worth investigating. Should MLB teams really be pledging millions to pre-teens?
Well, uh, no, they shouldn’t. In early August, I asked FanGraphs’ Brendan Gawlowski how he felt about international scouting these days, and he mentioned how objective measurements have changed the landscape in the last five years. But the second half of his response hit a bit harder:
“That said, it’s still a lot of dice rolls on 12-14 year olds in a way that feels pretty uncomfortable.”
I couldn’t agree more; there are political and cultural realities that shouldn’t be papered over, but the simple fact that a huge chunk of MLB’s talent pool are kids with big dreams who are often paid less than they should be is hard to defend. An international draft would be a step in the right direction, though it would require a substantial reformatting of how teams set up their international operations.
International scouting needs a complete re-work, and the lockout is the time to do it
But international scouting is, at this point, an abomination that I cannot possibly do justice in detailing here and one that supports financial impropriety though a class of unsavory skimmers and bad actors. It’s also one that MLB allows to exist by not doing more to rationalize the process, perhaps through a draft or perhaps through a more centralized, league-run academy system.
That idea is one I read from Michael Baumann back in June (FanGraphs members-only link), and he had another good (albeit impossible) idea: the total abolition of the draft in favor of total international free agency at age 18. Drafts are, if you think about them hard enough, morally intolerable and an abomination of labor rights. We could just do away with it all.
In any case, Kevin Sosa’s agreement will bring calls for the curtailing of a system that has mutated well out of control. It has been mutated for a while, and many of us would appreciate real changes in the next CBA. Unfortunately, given the throwdown that’s about to happen, I wouldn’t be shocked if it got backburnered.
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