Saturday, January 12th, 2008 by Adam Wagner
Pirates’ Dominican academy lets them catch up with everyone else
The Pirates finally decided to make a commitment to winning of sorts yesterday, committing to investing between $4 and $5 million to an academy in the Dominican Republic. The team hopes that this commitment will allow them to develop the presence in Latin America that the Team That Roberto Clemente Played For should have been attempting to fifteen years ago, allowing them to sign the most skilled players to developmental contracts at ridiculously young ages until their skills can take them to America.
Bob Nutting is willing to invest a significant amount of money in this academy, which is to be built outside of the town of El Toro, in the Dominican Republic, especially considering that the Tampa Bay Rays only spent $3 million to $4 million on theirs (thanks to Bucs Dugout for that info).
Finally building an academy could represent a step in the right direction for the Pirates, who have ignored signing Latin American players for entirely too long, considering that the last player to have been signed and developed to reach the major leagues for Pittsburgh was Jose Castillo. The team attempts to point to the success of its teams in the Dominican and Venezuela leagues, but those teams were both stacked with players older than the league’s norm, thereby invalidating much of their success.
The major question that should be asked is why the Pirates failed to look at the successes of other minor league organizations in bringing Latin American prospects in (see: Miguel Cabrera, Francisco Rodriguez, etc.) and ask, “How can we do that?” That no one in the organization decided that it would be a good idea to build an academy and attempt to reap its benefits is absolutely astounding. The Pirates are one of the teams that should have been one of the biggest players in the whole Latin American market, considering their history and the respect that Latin Americans have for the team. Instead, they chose to ignore it and are now seeing the effects on their minor league system, which is bare not only due to lousy drafting, but also due to the fact that the Pirates simply do not have any Latin Americans in their system.
For a small market team to not take advantage of Latin America and then to step in and act as if they are making some innovative step forward by building an academy is ridiculous. They should have done this before and the Pirates should be making comments more along the lines of, “We do not understand why this was not done in the past,” instead of “we needed to do this now.”
Remember, any benefits that are reaped from the academy will not be seen for about five or six years. Just building it, however, represents a step forward for an organization that had been utilizing ridiculously backward scouting practices.
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