You don’t even need to like baseball very much to find this fascinating. And of course most of us do. Kudos to Dejan and Jonoz13.

I also enjoyed the article, but it makes me laugh that signing a major league pitcher in the Caribbean is really not that different than picking a little league team in any small town. Replace buscones with annoying father. I can’t wait until we get our baseball academy.

This is a fantastic article.

What struck me most about the story was that it shows how unstructured, impulsive, and potentially circumstantial the signing process can be in the Dominican (and I’m assuming most other places in Latin America). Gayo didn’t have a tryout set when he arrived, but word of his presence on the island spurred buscones to quickly throw together a group of athletes for Gayo to see. That’s a far cry from the organized team baseball setting that scouts experience in the U.S. and shows that seeing the best talent is often a combination of connections and luck. Also, the fact that Gayo signed Frias so quickly after the tryout — while Frias was wearing a Dodgers hat and shirt — shows that it might often be first-come, first-served. If the Dodgers had made the first offer, would Frias be a Pirate? Final thought: It’s interesting to see how much autonomy Gayo has with his budget. He didn’t have to run the Frias signing by Huntington or any other member of the Pirate front office. That shows great trust by Huntington and the realities of having to nail down Latin American talent when the opportunities arise.

I also have to say that it’s great to have Dejan back. Given the wealth of great information he passes along via daily write-ups, notebooks, feature stories, blog posts and chats, he has to be considered one of the premier MLB beat writers in the country.

The unstructured nature of it shows why the idea of an international draft has had so much trouble getting off the ground. The need to impose some order on the process has so far been outweighed by the daunting logistics.

I think its great that have Gayo doing what he’s doing down there.