Barber: Why doesn’t MLB have more Mexican-born players?

Last Monday was Mexican Heritage Night in Oakland. Before the A’s faced the Kansas City Royals, ballet folklorico dancers stamped and twirled in center field. Mexican flags hung on the railing in left field and waved here and there in the stands. Stadium cameras showed fans wearing sombreros (Latinx people, as far as I saw, gracias a dios) and tri-colored scarves. A mariachi band, invisible to me in the press box, played throughout the evening, a tradition at baseball games in Mexico.

It was a particularly festive night at the Coliseum. And though the A’s would go on to lose in the ninth, reliever Joakim Soria - born in the Mexican state of Coahuila - marked the occasion by pitching a 1-2-3 eighth inning.

“Always Mexican culture has a lot of color,” Soria said in the clubhouse after the game. “And I like to see all the flags and all the people enjoying theirself in the stands. And it was fun. It was fun to watch it.”

The A’s have a lot of promotional nights. None could have presented a more natural fit than this one. So many of the Bay Area’s sports fans were born in Mexico, or have parents and grandparents who were. Besides that 2,000-mile border, the U.S. and Mexico share a passion for baseball.

Why, then, are there so few Mexican-born players in Major League Baseball?

The honor roll is solid, with names like Fernando Valenzuela, Teddy Higuera and Bobby Avila. But the overall numbers, never spectacular, have further stagnated recently.

On opening day 2019, MLB rosters included 102 players born in the Dominican Republic, 68 born in Venezuela - and exactly eight born in Mexico, including Soria. Even Cuba (19) and Puerto Rico (18) had more than double the representation.

The numbers are a puzzle. Mexico has a massive population of more than 120 million. Though the country isn’t as desperately poor as, say, the DR, you would assume the promise of American dollars is a big lure to Mexican prospects. We know they play baseball in Mexico. And it’s right there, just beyond the president’s cartoon wall.

“I don’t know that there’s any one reason we get more players from other countries,” A’s assistant general manager Dan Feinstein told me.

But one is pretty obvious.

“First and foremost, as much as they love baseball, Mexico is still a soccer culture,” Feinstein said. “There’s so many young kids that are playing soccer down there.”

No doubt. But Mexico’s fútbol team isn’t exactly an international power. And the country is big enough, and diverse enough, that it shouldn’t be an either/or issue.

Another idea I kept hearing is that Mexican prospects tend to be unprepared for the American minor-league system once they arrive. One person I spoke to informally, someone who was born in Mexico and rose through multiple levels of baseball there, described ballplayers from his country as lazy. That’s a pretty broad condemnation.

Edgar Gonzalez, who coached the Mexican team in the most recent World Baseball Classic, offered a more nuanced take to the Arizona Republic, which published a thorough examination of this subject in March. Mexico, Gonzalez said, has “a lot of guys who go (to the big leagues) and get a cup of coffee and go back down. It all has to do with discipline and habits of eating and weight training, all of that.”

Feinstein dismissed this one out of hand. “Our experience has been extremely positive with the young kids that have come through,” he said. “We have a catcher in Arizona who, if anything, plays above his ability, and works even harder than some of his peers. And I’ve seen Edgar’s academy, and the kids all play hard, and are full of energy and excitement.”

The real root of the problem, if you would call it that, is the Mexican Baseball League, or as it’s known there, Liga Mexicana de Béisbol. It’s a venerable league, founded in 1925. It once employed Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, and is now considered on par with Triple-A ball.

LMB’s existence is great for Mexican baseball fans, with 16 teams spread geographically from Tijuana to Cancun to the edge of the Sierra Madre (in Conclava, Joakim Soria’s hometown) to the thin air of Mexico City. Some of those teams draw close to 10,000 fans per game. But the league provides a disincentive to young baseball players who might otherwise look to the United States.

There is no Dominican or Venezuelan equivalent. Top prospects there have little choice but to move full speed toward the distant glory of MLB. In Mexico, young players know they can fall back on a solid salary playing in a more familiar, perhaps more welcoming environment.

“It’s not like in here. But they make good money,” Soria noted while sitting in front of his A’s locker. “And they play over there all year round, because they finish summer, they rest for a month or so and then go back to winter ball.”

And LMB teams don’t just passively keep their doors open to Mexican players. Historically, they have been roadblocks to the northward migration of baseball talent. Those teams tend to handle prospects the same way soccer clubs do all over the world - by identifying and signing players at a young age, and developing their skills in-house. That was true for Soria, who came up with Diablos Rojos of Mexico City.

Frequently, by the time an MLB team finds a player of value in Mexico, that athlete is under team control in the LMB. According to that Arizona Republic piece, the Mexican teams charge as much as 75 percent of a player’s signing bonus to release him.

Major League Baseball takes a dragnet approach to Venezuela and the DR, signing dozens of unproven prospects each year for contracts of less than $50,000. Because of the added costs, that rarely happens in Mexico.

Feinstein insisted the A’s have never really seen it as an impediment.

“It was a more complicated system, acquiring players from Mexico, than it is in some other countries,” he acknowledged. “… We have signed players from Mexico in recent years under the old system. We’ll sign players under the new system. It hasn’t stopped us from trying to bring quality Mexican players to our organization.”

Ah, the new system. Recent developments on both sides of the border promise to change the dynamic, creating a new paradigm for Mexican players.

It started in January 2017, when Major League Baseball opened La Academia y el Museo Interactivo del Béisbol de Sinaloa, in the city of Culiacan. It’s a classic baseball academy, like the ones MLB had previously created in Nicaragua and Brazil.

In the DR and Venezuela, it’s the academies, independent of local teams, that have emerged as the true incubators of talent. That had been missing in Mexico. No longer.

Relations deteriorated between MLB and LMB for a while after that, though. In 2018, citing allegations of corruption (but, one would think, also in response to those steep transfer fees), Major League Baseball banned its teams from signing players affiliated with Liga Mexicana de Béisbol clubs.

The ice thawed again last March, when MLB and the MLB Players Association announced an agreement with the LMB. Under this deal, affiliated Mexican players are free to sign with MLB teams once they turn 25 and have logged six or more years of experience at the professional level. Before that, Mexican teams can release their players to MLB organizations for 35 percent of a minor leaguer’s signing bonus or 15 percent of a major leaguer’s contract.

Feinstein said it has given teams like the A’s “a clearer pathway for Mexican players to come to the States.”

And everything accelerated with the inauguration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador last December. AMLO, as he is called, is an avowed leftist and a rabid baseball fan. He so fancies his ability on the diamond that he has posted videos on YouTube showing off his hitting and fielding skills. He is 65 years old.

Mere weeks into his presidency, López Obrador announced his plan to make baseball “the king of sports” in Mexico. His stated goal is to have 60 to 80 Mexican-born players in the American major leagues by the time his current term ends in 2024.

“That’s what you dream of,” Soria said. “You want to be out of Mexico and be part of a major-league team.”

To help the process, López Obrador named Gonzalez, who played with the San Diego Padres for two seasons and is the older brother of noted first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, head of the Office for the Promotion and Development of Baseball in Mexico, or Promobeis. AMLO funded the office with $17.5 million in 2019 and instructed Gonazalez to open 10 government-run baseball academies.

Mexican politics are always volatile, and ours have become just as unpredictable. Things can change. For now, though, it appears that Mexico is committed to developing more baseball talent, and that MLB teams will have greater access than ever to those players. The teams have noticed.

“Recently we have put a renewed emphasis on scouting Mexico,” Feinstein said. “We’re in the process of hiring a full-time scout there. We have both Latin American cross-checkers and U.S. cross-checkers make several trips to the MLB academy, and some of the organizations down there, their academies. So we scout Mexico really at this point as heavily as anywhere else.”

The potential now exists for a Mexican wave in Major League Baseball. Who knows? Maybe the time will come when every night is Mexican Heritage Night in Oakland. Sounds like fun to me.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: ?@Skinny_Post.