Draft dodgers no more - Can the Dominican Republic avoid Puerto Rico’s fate?

http://www.economist.com/node/21546064

Baseball in Latin America

Draft dodgers no more

Can the Dominican Republic avoid Puerto Rico’s fate?

Feb 4th 2012 | SANTO DOMINGO | from the print edition

 

Try a cricket bat instead SEEN from the air, much of Puerto Rico’s northern coast is a mosaic of rooftops and treetops dotted with countless baseball diamonds. The island of 4m has sent a total of 234 players to America’s Major League Baseball (MLB)—twice as many as Mexico. Its Baseball Hall of Fame, just outside San Juan, features a salon full of life-size statues of Puerto Rico’s athletic pantheon. It even includes a famous broadcaster seated at his microphone.

Today, however, the fields are mostly used for football. Just 2.6% of MLB players are Puerto Rican, down from 4.3% in 2001. The island’s renowned winter baseball league cancelled its season in 2007. A typical game now draws fewer spectators than nearby women’s volleyball matches. Its four teams are on the block for around $750,000 each. No one is buying. Several factors account for this decline. They include better job opportunities outside sports and competition from basketball, reggaetón music, multiplexes and malls. But the biggest was MLB’s inclusion of the island in its amateur draft in 1990.

Every year, MLB teams select 1,500 players from schools and universities. The clubs get to pick in reverse order of their finish in the league the previous season. Draftees can negotiate only with the team that chooses them. Officially, the draft is meant to help the worst teams by giving them the best young talent. But all clubs love it because it reduces signing bonuses.

When the draft began in 1965, only Americans were eligible. But 25 years later MLB extended it to Canada and Puerto Rico. In theory, this should not have affected the number of Puerto Ricans signed, since undrafted players become free agents, who can sign with any team they wish. But in practice, MLB clubs rarely sign them; they tell them to go to university and try their luck in the draft later on. The draft thus forced Puerto Ricans to compete with Americans for a fixed number of places.

Moreover, whereas Puerto Ricans could previously be signed at age 16, a high-school degree (usually given at 18) is required for the draft. Since the island’s schools do not have baseball teams, its 16- and 17-year-olds had nowhere to train. As a result, the number of Puerto Rican MLB signings fell by 13% in 1991-92. Meanwhile, players from the Dominican Republic (DR) and Venezuela remained free agents. Their numbers soared (see chart).

Now those countries may be facing Puerto Rico’s fate. As more clubs started to recruit in Latin America, signing bonuses took off: the average payout in the DR rose from $29,000 in 2004 to $108,000 in 2008. In response, teams tried to cut costs. In November MLB’s teams and its players’ union reached a deal that levies a tax on clubs whose spending on foreign free agents exceeds a cap. It also sets up a committee to institute an international draft by 2014.

In the DR, MLB’s biggest source of foreign players, the reaction has been apoplectic. Baseball is big business there: MLB’s direct value to the economy is $125m-150m a year (0.3% of GDP). Its 30 clubs all have training academies for their players, mainly in poor rural areas. They employ 1,200 people, many in new professions like groundskeeper and sports nutritionist. And in response to criticism that they exploit youngsters, they are offering better education. The Pittsburgh Pirates require four hours of class a day, and last year granted 13 high-school degrees.

The indirect benefits are bigger still. An estimated 2,000-3,000 scouts and trainers, called buscones, scour the country for players and house, feed and instruct them until they sign an MLB contract. They charge 30% of the bonus. Some buscones employ dozens of workers. The winter league plays nearly 200 games a year, each drawing thousands of fans. Casa de Campo, a golf resort, now has a Latino Baseball Hall of Fame. Many players also have charities: Pedro Martínez, a star pitcher, has built a youth centre offering art, cooking and computer classes to 300 students. A draft could put all this in peril, by reducing bonuses and possibly the number of contracts.

Rafael Pérez, MLB’s director of Dominican operations, insists that MLB wants at least to maintain the current number of foreign signings. But many buscones accuse MLB of selling out Latinos to protect American players’ jobs. They note there is just one Latino on MLB’s international-talent committee—who, as the son of an MLB player, mostly grew up in America. “I feel like we’re being invaded, like it’s 1965 all over again,” says Astin Jacobo, a buscón, referring to America’s occupation of the DR. “We’re only number one in one thing, and that’s baseball. We can’t give that away.”

A group of Dominican buscones has already held anti-draft protests. They might convince MLB to set up a separate draft for foreigners with an eligibility age of 16, which would be less disruptive than extending America’s draft abroad. But stopping the draft entirely will be hard.Many buscones talk of a strike. But they have not formed a union. Even if they do, they could not stop their players from opting to sign with MLB teams.That leaves the government. Felipe Payano, the sports minister, has already written a letter to Bud Selig, MLB’s commissioner, expressing his opposition to a draft. He says his office is investigating whether it might violate the DR’s free-trade agreement with America. Another option would be to sue MLB for collusion under Dominican antitrust law. But it would take a lot of pluck for a small, poor, baseball-dependent country to pick a fight like that.

Corruption in Argentine football -- Foul play

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2012/02/corruption-argentine-football/print

Feb 18th 2012, 14:23 by D.S. | BUENOS AIRES

RENOWNED worldwide for their sublime skills, Argentina’s footballers are a source of great pride to their countrymen. Yet few law-abiding Argentines hold their football league in similar high regard. Many of those involved in it are tainted by corruption, from club presidents down to security guards at matches. Money laundering in the system is thought to be rife. In a long-overdue effort to clean up the game, the government this month introduced new financial-disclosure requirements for the league and its teams. But these still pale in comparison with the scale of the problem.
Argentina has been under pressure to combat corruption since last June, when the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international body set up to fight money laundering, placed it on a “grey list” of countries whose efforts to root out wrongdoing do not measure up. Although the FATF did not single out football, it had expressed its concerns about money laundering in the game in a report published in July 2009, which made reference to Argentina. Inclusion on the grey list carries an implicit warning that a country risks ending up on the FATF’s notorious “black list” unless it makes progress. Countries in that category have, in the past, found it extremely difficult to do business with any of the FATF’s 34 members, which include big economies like America, Britain and France, as well as Mexico, another Latin American heavyweight.
Largely in response to the FATF’s criticisms, the government this month forced the Argentine Football Association, the sport’s national governing body, to adopt a new set of rules. For a start, it must file an annual report on every member of staff paid at least $13,800 a year (including bonuses, prizes and gifts), as must every club in the top two divisions of the league. They also have to provide details of payments they make to corporate sponsors, government officials and anybody else with whom they do business. Failure to disclose this information can result in a fine of up to $23,000. And if reports uncover evidence of illegal payments, the fine can be as much as ten times the sum involved. Unless the Argentine Football Association strictly enforces the new rules, the government says it will withdraw the $200m it provides each year so that football fans can enjoy televised matches free of charge.
None of this is likely to be sufficient to stop the rot. Corruption has flourished due largely to the activities of the so-called barrabravas, violent groups of fans with interests in organised crime. The story of their rise dates back to the 1950s, when officials started trading free tickets for fans’ votes, which they needed to win election to a club’s board. As these fans grew more powerful and demanding, they began to take illicit control of club affairs like ticketing and the sale of refreshments during matches. Today, club directors often owe their positions entirely to barrabravas. Footballers are also under their control, sometimes splitting wages with them. Players from Boca Juniors, Argentina’s most popular club, even visited Rafael Di Zeo (pictured), the former boss of the team’s barrabrava, when he was in jail (he was released in May 2010 after serving more than three years for assault).
Barrabravas have already taken some blame for the decline of several big clubs in recent years. The most notable case is that of River Plate, one of the oldest teams in Latin America, which was relegated to the second division last year for the first time in its 110-year history. Its demotion followed years of mismanagement and corruption—exacerbated by infighting between members of the club’s own barrabrava—that left it saddled with huge debts, forcing it to sell its most gifted players to wealthy European clubs.
The new rules are certainly a step in the right direction for Argentina. Besides making it harder for miscreants to launder money with impunity, the government has given the Argentine Football Association an incentive to police the system effectively by threatening to withdraw its funding of television coverage. But having shown scant regard for existing laws and regulations, the barrabravas seem unlikely to pay much heed to new rules on financial disclosure. If Argentina’s government is serious about ending the corruption, it will need to confront the gangs on the terraces and in the streets. That is an altogether tougher prospect.

Women in Mexican politics. The XX factor -- Can a woman candidate count on female voters’ support?

http://www.economist.com/node/21547282

UNTIL this year, no woman had ever been the presidential candidate for any of Mexico’s main political parties. That changed on February 5th, when Josefina Vázquez Mota, a former secretary of education and of social development, won the primary of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). “I will be Mexico’s first presidenta” (female president), she said in her victory speech.

Ms Vázquez is a clear underdog in the July 1st election. Polls taken before the primary put the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) nearly 20 points ahead of the ruling PAN (see chart). Voters have tired of the PAN, which has presided over slow growth and rising violence during 11 years in power. Ms Vázquez could even finish third behind Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, a left-winger who narrowly lost the 2006 race.

No one knows if Mexico’s supposedly macho voters are open to a female candidate. Women only gained the right to vote in 1953. But Mexican politics is not especially male-dominated: women hold over a quarter of congressional seats. That is a higher proportion than America’s and twice as high as the share in Brazil, which elected a female president in 2010.
Ms Vázquez has said she considers her sex an advantage. It certainly helps to distinguish her from Felipe Calderón, the unpopular current president and a fellow PAN member. According to Mitofsky, a polling firm, women outnumber men by a fifth among her supporters.
Meanwhile, her rivals’ attempts to woo female voters have not gone well. The PRI’s handsome Enrique Peña Nieto, whose rallies draw throngs of swooning señoritas, was thought to have an edge with them. But when he was recently asked if he knew the price of meat and tortillas, he replied that he was not “the lady of the house”. A few weeks later an ex-girlfriend accused him of neglecting children he fathered outside marriage. The fiery Mr López has tried to soften his image by promising a “loving republic”. But women seem unmoved. A majority of both candidates’ fans are male.
Women have always been less likely to vote than men in Mexico. Might that change this year? The gender gap has disappeared in school-attendance and literacy rates. A third of women work outside the home, helped by a fall in the fertility rate from nearly seven children per woman in the 1960s to around two today. But younger Mexicans of both sexes are less likely to vote than others; and Ms Vázquez’s opposition to abortion may not appeal to the new generation of empowered women. She clearly needs their support to close the gap.

What does "Latin Music" mean to you?

What does "Latin Music" mean to you?
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