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SAN CRISTOBAL--As outfielder Marco Caminaro sprints the 60 yards from home plate toward right field, pumping his arms and doing his best to make a good impression during a tryout camp at the Nationals' Dominican Republic academy Sunday, Juan Cano rests his arms on a railing overlooking the complex and scans the field.
It is with particular interest that Cano trains his eye on Caminaro.
Cano discovered Caminaro in a little league program in San Pedro de Macoris, took him into his home and fed him three meals a day. He watched after him and helped him with his schooling and trained him at his own academy, honing his baseball skills: hitting, fielding and throwing.
And if Caminaro is signed, by the Nationals or any other team, Cano will get 25 percent of his signing bonus.
"We don't work free. Nobody works free," said Cano, one of nearly thousands of talent scouts, or buscones , who scour the Dominican Republic for players. "We work out with them and try to get them into professional baseball. It's what we do. We train the kids and he probably would never play in baseball if we weren't there."
The search for players in the Dominican Republic has become a lucrative business. With more than 100 Dominican players in the big leagues, this tiny island has long been a haven for prospect-hungry major league teams, who occupy the island with nearly as many academies as their big-league stadiums in the United States.
But the pool of players is controlled by a controversial group of amateur coaches/scouts/surrogate fathers known as buscones , or "finders."
They help develop talent on the island, nurturing players toward professional baseball in their own private academies, but they also act as agents and negotiate signing bonuses, pocketing their own significant pieces of the pie in the process.
And in many ways, they have changed the way Major League Baseball teams do business on the island--and sometimes not for the better.
"The problem is like in any other group of persons; you are going to find hard-working guys with integrity and others that have no ethics, and that is the problem," said Ronaldo Peralta, the manager of Major League Baseball's office in the Dominican Republic. "The problem is those few with no ethics have created such a scandal that in general they have a bad reputation."
More than 5,000 buscones search the island for talent, Peralta said, skirting Major League Baseball's rules that prohibit teams from negotiating with players under the age of 16.
Buscones scout players as young as 9 years old, following their progress through scattered little leagues until they are old enough to sign, and Major League Baseball has no ability to regulate the system, leaving plenty of opportunity for abuse.
Peralta said buscones have been accused of exploiting players and families, demanding cuts in excess of 40 percent and 50 percent--and sometimes even larger. Buscones have also falsified documents to make some prospects seem younger than they are, and they have been linked to increasing use of steroids in the country.
Two Dominican players died last year after ingesting veterinary supplements to jump ahead of the competition.
"There is a lot of good being done, but unfortunately some bad people have done a lot of damage to the game and to the industry," Peralta said.
Basilio Vizcaino's minor league pitching career ended thanks to a bad elbow, but Vizcaino estimates that he's helped more than a dozen other Dominican players sign professional contracts, including Esmailyn Gonzalez, the 16-year-old shortstop who received a $1.4 million signing bonus from the Washington Nationals last season.
Vizcaino received 20 percent of Gonzalez's signing bonus ($280,000), a huge sum in a country where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and American dollars go a long way.
And Vizcaino makes no apologies.
Gonzalez grew up extremely poor in the small sugar cane-farming town of Pizarette. With what is left of his signing bonus, he's building a home for his family, and the white Cadillac Escalade he bought after he signed comes close to dwarfing his family's ramshackle three-room home.
Vizcaino took Gonzalez into his baseball academy when the shortstop was 14 years old, fed him and trained him and showed him to scouts. Without his help, Vizcaino says Gonzalez would not have developed into the prospect in which the Nationals chose to invest a small fortune.
Vizcaino said he has more than 15 other players under contract and a staff of four to help him train the players, scouting them as early as 9 years old and starting to establish relationships at age 12.
He brought six players to the Nationals' tryout camp Sunday.
"Here we don't have university baseball or high school baseball," Vizcaino said. "If they don't get into the program, they'll have a hard time.
"They're better prepared when they sign," Vizcaino adds, "and they also don't have any other options than us."
Most observers agree, and accept the system as a part of a long-standing system, a necessary evil in the player chase. Competition among buscones is fierce for players, and very few players are not connected to a buscón in some form.
Dana Brown, the Nationals' amateur scouting director, knows that behind any player he is interested in will be a buscón that will handle negotiations.
"Sometimes, it's a battle," Brown said. "At the end of the day, it becomes about money sometimes and that's why there is no substitute for relationships."
Jose Rijo, who runs the Nationals' Dominican Republic academy, worries about players being exploited for profit, but said most of the buscones help the players rather than hurt them.
Cano is one of a handful of former major leaguers working as a buscón , and he can point to his own son as a success story. Robinson Cano plays second base for the New York Yankees, and his father still acts as his agent.
"I hate to admit that they really help them," Rijo said. " They are getting better nutrition, a better place to sleep, better everything. That's why they pay so much money to the buscón ."
But the buscones have long drawn the attention of Major League Baseball, and though MLB can do little to police the buscones , they've pressured the Dominican Republic government to take action.
Peralta said the government passed a law last year that would cap the cut buscones can take from signing bonuses. The law would allow buscones to take 15 percent for players they've been involved with for more than a year, and 10 percent for players they've coached for less than a year.
The law, however, is being contested and has not gone into effect, Peralta said.
"We are very hopeful," Peralta said. "We hope that next year that law will be in place and players will have an instrument to defend their rights. The abuse will be stopped."
Buscones, too, have sought to clean up their act. Cano said there is a push among some of his colleagues to stop falsifying documents, and he defended the high percentages charged to players.
"What we do is different than what [agents] do," Cano said. "They get the kids and they are ready. They don't spend any money. We spend the money. When they sign some of these kids or some of these players, someone has been training [them] and giving [them] food and everything."
Cano doesn't even like to be called a buscón anymore.
He prefers the term independent scout, but the stigma still remains.
"I don't trust any of them, even the good ones," Rijo said. "They all want to get the most money. They all are trying to tell you the things you want to hear. It's just hard to believe."
To reach TODD JACOBSON:
Email: tjacobson@freelancestar.com