International free agent question

Any highly skilled 12-year-old with the potential to enter an academy Major League Baseball school such as the ones run by the New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds sharing the Loma del  facility (built by Jose Rijo), or the Towers Baseball facility that the Rangers use (and which is owned by Pirates reliever Solomon Torres) will not be wasting time playing Little League. He will have already been identified by some local scout who will hook him up with a baseball activity center like La Liga Deportiva Betemit in Los Mina, another slum community in Santo Domingo. And it is at the Betemit school where he will hone his baseball skills until he can sign with a major league club at age 16.

The Betemit school is an enclosed cement block wall in the heart of an older small factory and residential part of Santo Domingo. It is not a safe place to be after dark.

Each day has two sessions that run for at least three hours. One session is for younger boys, ages 5-13; and one session for boys 13-19.

Each weekday, the entire three hours are spent studying baseball. About 150 boys attend each session. The only way a boy is allowed to participate is if he can demonstrate he has been to public school that day. Most schools in the area are open late into the night and children attend classes when they can. Work often gets in the way.

At the academy, the Little League motto of "Character, Courage, Loyalty" is in constant operation. Mix in an extraordinary work ethic and an adherence to discipline, and you have got what the newspapers in the Dominican Republic call un laboratorio de peloteros -- a laboratory of baseball players.

While you see joking and smiling and hear laughing, what you don't see is goofing off. Ever. Fun is not part of the equation. There are families to support and careers to pursue.

The first hour of each session is spent on calisthenics, the second on fielding drills, the third on batting practice. Whistles from the instructors are all that is needed to have 150 kids working together. Any deviation from the routine and the offender will be thinking about it while running laps. Games are played on the weekends.

The serious work happens about twice a month, when groups of scouts from the MLB academies come to evaluate players and, perhaps, offer a 16-year-old the big ticket to an MLB ballclub's academy. That ticket usually comes with a $4-5,000 signing bonus, but of course there are more and more six-figure signings.

Sacramento Bee sportswriter Marcos Breton's book Home Is Everything: The Latino Baseball Story highlights the appeal of the academies:

"Teams house their players in dormitories and feed their prospects balanced meals. Often it's the first time these boys will sleep under clean sheets or eat nutritious meals. The firsts don't stop there: Some of these boys encounter a toilet for the first time. Or an indoor shower. They are taught discipline, the importance of being on time, of following instructions."

The competition to get into the "baseball factories," as they are often referred to, is fierce.

In the PBS documentary Stealing Home,  sports anthropologist Alan Klein describes  the scene in front of one of the academies:

"Every morning you would drive to the Academy, you would see fifteen, twenty kids out there, not one of them had a uniform, they all had pieces of one uniform or another, poor equipment, they would be right at the gate waiting for the security people to open up the gates and they would go in for their tryout. If they got signed, they were happy. If they didn't get signed, it didn't even deter them for a minute; they would be on the road hitchhiking to the next location. And they would eventually find one of those 20-some clubs that would eventually pick them up."